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| Melissa
Stein's
poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Review,
American Poetry Review, New England Review, Best New Poets
2009, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, North American Review,
Cimarron Review, The Journal, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received
artist residency fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony,
the Djerassi Foundation, the Montalvo Center for the Arts,
the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative
Arts. Her poems were awarded first prize in the Spoon River
Poetry Review Editor's Prize Contest, Literal Latté Poetry
Awards, and Robert Penn Warren Awards, and won two Dorothy
Sargent Rosenberg Awards and two Barbara Bradley Awards.
Currently a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco,
she holds an MA in creative writing from the University of
California at Davis.
See
other poems:
Email
Melissa Stein
at melissastein@pacbell.net
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Olives,
Bread, Honey, and Salt
The lanes
are littered with the bodies of bees.
A torrent took them, swarming in branches
just as the white buds loosened their hearts
of pale yellow powder. Each body is a lover:
the one with skin blank as pages; the one
so moved by the pulse ticking in your throat;
the one who took your lips in his teeth
and wouldn’t let go; the one who turned
from you and lay there like a carcass. If we were
made to be whole, we wouldn’t be so lost
to each offering of tenderness and a story.
Therefore our greatest longing is our home.
There is always the one bee that circles and circles,
twitching its sodden wings.
First
published in New England Review, 2004. Copyright © Melissa
Stein.
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