Somewhere a beehive has been knocked down.
There’s no one to claim the body lying, here.
Somewhere, someone has pushed in and back
the honeycomb’s walls. The wind
rolls a ball of hair on the ground,
beside the boy’s head; an ant climbs the slope
of his nose, up to his eyes, coveting
the tissue exposed to the sun . Here,
someone pulled honey from out of its nest.
A gold band hugging his finger; its two letters
spell his name. Here, where the cane is a giant
with no eyes, gathering the sweetness left
in the marrow of this land, someone’s robbed
the bees. No one calls his name,
in this field where there’s no sugar.
Ines Rivera Prosdocimi finished her M.F.A in Creative Writing at American University in 2009. Her work has appeared in the Afro-Hispanic Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Border Senses, Brush Mountain Review, Callaloo, Hispanic Cultural Review, Kweli Journal, PALABRA, Pterodáctilo, Poet Lore, Revista LENGUA, and The Caribbean Writer. Recently, her manuscript, “The Flamboyan’s Red Petals,” was a finalist in the 2010 Crab Orchard Series in the Poetry First Book Award competition.