(CW) The Bee Girl

I watch the bloated honeybees
as they violate innocent
        roses. Milking them for candied nectar. Weaving between petals
        like greedy, hungry men.
I breeze past them, a summer
ghost-girl. Lifting my dress.
      Inviting them in with white cotton-girl panties with red lady-
            bugs scampering along daisy-chain
            seams.
The bees billow under my dress
like wind, until I am floating
      along the measure of Summer and Fall. Their barbed sounds
             music to my ears, muffled as they
             are under my airy frock.
I am the bee girl. A child, soon
to become a woman. Wire
       stings beneath the resplendent yellow of my dress. Bees dying,
              following subsequence stings
              to inner thighs.
Their stingers, embedded within
supple child-flesh, invite me.
      I will bleed now. As the bees drop from my ballooned skirts
            to hard-leafed ground below.
            I fall.
Soft nipple hardening
against frail cotton fabric.

A.J. Terlesky is a Canadian writer that moved from New Zealand to the U.S. two years ago. Mainly focused on poetry, she has published in journals such as These Fragile Lilies, Tenemos, and Spank the Carp to name a few.