My mother was like the bees

because she needed a lavish taste on her tongue, a daily tipple of amber and gold to waft her into the sky, a soluble heat trickling down her throat. Who could blame her for starting out each morning with a swig of something furious in her belly, for days when she dressed in flashy lamé leggings like a starlet, for wriggling and dancing a little madly, her crazy reels and her rumbas, for coming home wobbly with a flicker of clover’s inflorescence still clinging to her clothes, enough to light the darkness of a pitch-black hive.