While waiting at the acupuncture clinic
to receive some bee stings, I saw the bees
dancing into the bottles. Fuzzy yellow and
black tiny bodies dancing in an hexagonal
manner. They didn’t care about surveillance.
They kept touching the glass leaving nothing
behind, just repressed buzzes, the voice I use
to ward off pains and life’s obscurities and
incoherence. Thus, I like to think of bee stings
as mushroom clouds of released anxieties.
I like to think of their venom as a mythic rain.
I like to think of their dance as an algebra.
I like to think of a bee as a new planet where
can find my particles of ash; my lost maps.
ALI ZNAIDI (b.1977) lives in Redeyef, Tunisia. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014), and Mathemaku x5 (Spacecraft Press, 2015). For more, visit aliznaidi.blogspot.com and @AliZnaidi.