The Beekeeper
That summer, I walked barefoot through the countryside in a bee suit,
cradling several hives. Making provisions for a more eloquent future. I
stumbled into a country estate, into a seasonal job fishing newlyweds
from an ornamental Japanese pond. Arranging their delicate bones on
showroom furniture. I was praised for my efforts, for maintaining an
atmosphere of scrupulous care. The grieving bees swarmed lovingly over
their synthetic faces. That summer, I became a certified bee whisperer &
began consulting on the fortunes of several young aspiring apiarists.
They spoke to me through the confessional’s partitions of tattered
honeycomb. Their advice was fittingly oblique and aphoristic. Follow
your dreams, and whatever you do, don’t drink the sugar water. I printed
several of their finest specimens inside the world’s festering core. A
dredged bride got up from a priceless chaise-longue with no memory of
how she arrived there. She walked out into yellow and black rainfall. Her
bridal veil remains snagged on the fingers of a sycamore. Later my hives
were ransacked & the bees flew south. That winter though, opinion over
my bee suit was divided: some declared it the height of style, while others
asked: is it simply a painful reminder of everything we have lost?
woolf at the door
invariably, it’s been a banner year. the screaming
from the blow-up doll’s ruptured aorta
has become strangely soothing
like eating ice-cold watermelon gelato in the morgue.
while my ghosts are on holiday,
i’m setting up cryptic vibe tests,
baking cookies shaped like neo-gothic masonry
for the dark academia crowd.
i’m in the hamptons eating sunflowers
& racing my miniature toy hearse around the bay.
at the debutante ball, i’m honing in on
an almond-scented body-scrub for unrequited love,
prescribing eye drops for inconsolable grief.
i’m the standard pallbearer
at elizabeth taylor’s divorce proceedings.
here’s looking at you kid, from inside
the eyeholes of richard burton’s corpse. hello.
the debutantes have invented
this devastating cello solo in o-minor
they refuse to donate.
i’m making extinct balloon animals
at a birthday party of child-sized critics
telling me to get a real job.
when i see you descending
the moving staircase in a cobwebbed veil,
my mood ring runs oxytocin black,
milk-deficiency pink, liberace blue.
i’m watching carrie’s hands
strangle a long-stemmed rose
each finger painted with a small cross
each repetition perfectly calibrated for maximum effect
after all these years,
who’s afraid of virginia woolf?
not us, cowering behind an artificial fern.
getting tattoos.
hooking a polygraph lie-detector test
up to the veins of a sunflower.
rain falling into the casket
of my distant love interest.
new in town & looking for casual fun.
in the words of Descartes,
to contemplate absence as a semiotic construct
is to live in absentia.
i gave up the ghost.
the ghost gave me up.
i’m giving the ghost one last chance
not to break our synthetic, lab-grown hearts.
_____________
Nathaniel King is a poet from Cornwall, UK. His debut pamphlet, Ghost Clinic, was published with Broken Sleep Books and won a 2024 Eric Gregory Award. He is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Royal Holloway, conducting research on folklore and hauntological poetics. He lives and teaches in London.
These poems were chosen by Anthropocene Guest Editor HLR.
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