Melanie Graham holds a PhD in poetry from the University of Lancaster, UK and recently completed her MFA at Sierra Nevada College. Her poems have appeared in Drunken Boat, Cherry Tree, The Mailer Review, a​nd as a finalist in several competitions, including The Southeast Review, Split This Rock, a​nd So To Speak. She won the 2016 Kakalak Poetry Prize.

Honeybees Returned

Back from Greece, Africa, vacation
in the afterlife,

they
     show
   up

dissident to our worry, fretting their endangerment,
ice cream campaigns engineered

to save. Exclaiming Welcome!, we reach
to pet their tiny fur, disavow wooden boxes, fan

them toward the riotous banquet
of Lady Sylvias. Aloof, jaundiced

saddlebags bulging, they stuff away the sticky
yellow like secrets, stolen notes, lifting off

each petal in silence,
as if we once squandered sugar

of someone they loved
and they have not forgotten.