​FLOWER CONROY

Bee

C₂₁H₂₃NO₅

​The organizing principle was time. Hive gothic. Venom or apitoxin. You strike the i in shine. My cousin Kat cleans a spoon with a candle flame. You’ve your own language independent of clock & spot for something is burning. It was not mistakes you enunciated but rather mist aches, stumbling back  toward  your  golden  cauldron.  Some moments are razor in the apple, shard of amber in the stew. They can slay you.  This was no longer one of them—you could call it reprieve,  call  it  Narcan,  an  anti-buzz.  The  hairsbreadth quantity  greater  than  recommended  is  the  difference between dose & over-. Violins for wings. Molasses-like bubbling in a cusp. Alternative apitherapy method: your acupuncture  shortens  withdrawal.  Mutes  the  desire  for having  wings—slang  for  shooting  up.  Thus  your  touch  like the woody nightshade which is also known as bittersweet. Because sun struck the band of rhinestones rainbow-flecks splayed arcane across surfaces: the result was raw nerve, her wrist turning over & over midair the syringe looking soft- looking

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225 The Paris-American

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LGBTQIA+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy’s books include Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder, A Sentimental Hairpin and Greenest Grass. Her/their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, American Literary Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere. Currently she is working on a series of Ephemeral Altars—temporary compositions of assemblage art as inspired by various poetry collections.

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Upcoming poet:
Aaron Zhang