Dakota Reed
in the dream all the bees were dead
wings wilted still as morning
my hands sticky with honey
their little bodies like lint
stuck to the carpet like
confetti leftover and limp
from a party
already forgotten
I thought a bad omen
that afternoon I almost cut
my fingertip off while
slicing a green apple into
thin slivers like crescent moons
like waxy wings falling into
a pile of themselves
I found a butterfly later on my walk
into town let it balance
on my bandage for a few blocks
‘til it flew from my finger
fluttered
into the road
floated down
onto wet ground
and was run over by a black
car slick
with rain
I thought a bad omen
now we all wear surgical
masks and wash our hands raw
my fingertip is still throbbing
stinging from the soap from the serrated
blade opening back up like the slow
spread of wings blooming
with blood
in the dream
all the bees were dead
but I could still hear them
buzzing
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Dakota Reed is a copyeditor for Atmosphere Press. She received her MFA in poetry from the College of Charleston, where she was a Woodfin Fellow and senior editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. Her work is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, has been published in Blood Orange Review and has been awarded the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Nancy Walton Pringle Memorial Prize, College of Charleston’s MFA Creative Writing Prize and honorable mention in AWP’s Intro Journals Project.