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, and as a finalist in several competitions, including The Southeast Review, Split This Rock, and 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.