Bees
I sat in a nest of yellow jackets,
a bunch of bees.
One corner of River and Madison
was woods, trees and brush.
Bulldozers came. Then a Dairy Queen.
Now a bank.
Maybe the dozers drew me from my house
up the block to the woods’ edge.

Heavy equipment, near River,
made a developer’s dream reality.
The woods’ edge a slope,
in brush, feeling stings, swatting bees.
Standing, flailing,
saved by water. I was four.

Rita Eliot in her yard,
her spout watering flowers or bushes,
saw me
and water was near, a hose with jets strong
enough to drive off the bees.
Were she not there…
I remember a bath,
I want to say, of witch hazel and water.
A few years later, her son, Dale
moved to Montana to cowboy,

fell off a horse,
and lay in a coma.
I hadn’t seen Dale in a long while,
his dimpled chin, olive skin,
wavy blond hair, his face
clearer than Rita’s.
I sat at a kitchen table. In my mind
he lay in a gulch, she couldn’t wake him.

Lonesome
The greatest mystery is the human body.
In Lonesome there’s Barbara Kent
who lived to be one hundred and three.
In the Zoom Jude said his father died
from Alzheimer’s at fifty-two. The eyes
tell the story, in Lonesome Barbara’s,
in the Zoom Jude’s. “He had all these plans.”
They lived in Jude, his son’s eyes, memories.
In Lonesome Barbara wakes in her bed
in her studio apartment, goes to a window
and looks out, goes to a mirror on a wall
and looks at her reflection. Jude remembers
his father’s voice, his father in a doorway.
How and when his father started forgetting
Jude didn’t say. Barbara sits in the sand
at Coney Island, her smiling face in the sun
flower fresh among seashore bathers.
Jude remembers his father knotting a tie
in a mirror, light coming through a window.
In the dark night in Lonesome, the wheel
of a rollercoaster catches fire, orange
sparks blaze from the track, Barbara faints
on the ride. Jude’s father had plans.
Jude teaches government courses
at a university. For thirty years he worked
for a county. In Lonesome strangers lifted
Barbara from the car. Lying on a bench
she opened her eyes. She got up. She
searched through the crowd for her beau,
who was searching for her. On the coaster
they’d been separated, so eager was all
the crowd to board, ready for the twists
and turns, the speed. When Jude,
age sixty, said “all these plans” we saw
his eyes but not what he was seeing.
The wrinkles under his eyes barely visible.

The Postage Stamps of Lima
The postage stamps of Lima,
the animal crackers on shelves,
and the kittens on the Cracker Barrel porch
took pride in their work.
It was a holiday for the morticians.
Will Fisher flipped a switch
that lit the Queen Anne’s marquee at dusk.

The ventriloquist sat in the Edsel in silence,
a map of Maine opened in her lap.
The Cardinals began their season.
Carol wrote to a pen pal in Manilla about
jagged edges of a snapper’s black shell,
chimneys’ coiling smoke and
a bus conductor’s making a pass at her.

Susan Sakowski, a fortune teller,
said my future is in aviation
on the business end.
I’ll travel to the Midwest and the upper west
coast. I bowled with her brother Mike.
I spilled grape soda on a carpet.
Its stains wore the shape of flowers.

You can learn more about Peter by clicking onto his bio: https://thievingmagpie.org/peter-mladinic-bio/