Bees by Marcus Myers

are the terrible 
builders 
of the stars. 

In this false
parsing,
I seated myself in

his terrace 
all wrong. 
In the golden dust 

of our toppled
towers, once-
real, the scaffolded

return of petals, 
vines, 
trumpets,  

nectar 
guides. 
I’ll decline

the glass of wine,
the hunk 
of bread.

Instead, I’ll see
the bees clean 
as Rilke’s cloying angels, 

those eternal spring 
peepers.
And stars,
 
those third eyes
I can see through now, 
those once mistaking 

720,000 
sunbaked bricks
for vertices, 

their goat entrails 
fingered as texts—
sky to fields,

cultivating us—
Wright, 
you and me. As precious-

ly sowing seed
and carrying 
granules of like-

and unlikeness 
on hands 
and feet, one

stratum unto 
another. I am done. 
That’s not for me. 




After misreading Charles Wright’s “The Bees are The Terrace Builders of The Stars” as “The Bees are The Terrible Builders of The Stars”

Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, MO, where he teaches and serves as a co-founding and managing editor of Bear Review. In 2022, the Poet Laureate of Missouri published one of his poems, alongside those by MO poets Mary Jo Bang, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Aliki Barnstone, John Gallaher, Jenny Molberg and others, as a tiny book to hand to “readers who say they don’t read poetry”. Author of Cloud Sanctum (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and semifinalist in the 2019, 92NY’s Discovery Poetry Contest, his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Common, The Cortland Review, The Florida Review, Hunger Mountain, The Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Poetry South, RHINO, Salt Hill, Tar River Poetry, Windfall Room and other such journals.

30 September 2024