Festooning
by Lisa Compo
When building their hives, bees use the measurement of themselves.
Creating lacework that weaves their legs to each other. Architecture
in the mathematics of the body. All I can envision
is breaking against the bodies in that childhood game
Red Rover, how I would stoop below hands
instead of shattering through and enter the field
behind. That separate quiet of the dried grass at the end, the metal
fence weeded through. I’d ask the sky to bend close, speak
through my cupped hands, hoping for anything then
to lay within them. There are fewer beats of flight in the sky
now, and I frame monarch tatters, the orange and black pressed
between glass that is measured by the turn
of day’s light. Sometimes I notice movement
in the trick of reflection, a remaking that you hope
for when the body has left
and all that is in place of it stays the same.
Creating lacework that weaves their legs to each other. Architecture
in the mathematics of the body. All I can envision
is breaking against the bodies in that childhood game
Red Rover, how I would stoop below hands
instead of shattering through and enter the field
behind. That separate quiet of the dried grass at the end, the metal
fence weeded through. I’d ask the sky to bend close, speak
through my cupped hands, hoping for anything then
to lay within them. There are fewer beats of flight in the sky
now, and I frame monarch tatters, the orange and black pressed
between glass that is measured by the turn
of day’s light. Sometimes I notice movement
in the trick of reflection, a remaking that you hope
for when the body has left
and all that is in place of it stays the same.
Lisa Compo is an MFA candidate and teaching assistant at UNC - Greensboro. She has received nominations for a 2023 Pushcart award and for the 2022 Best of the Net. She has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Memorious, Plume, Permafrost, Zone 3, The Journal, and elsewhere.