G.C. Waldrep’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Boulevard, Verse, New American Writing, Boston Review, and other journals. His fourth collection, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (in collaboration with John Gallaher), was released by BOA Editions in 2011. He lives in Lewisburg, PA, where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as editor-at-large for The Kenyon Review. Tea Ceremony G.C. Waldrep The sick queen crochets bees from pockets palsied stevedores serrate, then ties with string the cineplex to suburbs swabbed in pollen. The poet speaks precisely so we hear the “b” in “lamb,” the “p” and “t” of “slept,” the double “s” of “thrusts” while just outside the mad persist in solitary telethons. I misperceive nativity for one more language I can’t learn, se-quench of tongue (re)versed and versioned in the barrel chests of ocean liners. The sick queen coughs a scratchy patch of plexiglass on which some doctor’s dank prescription branches as a scrawl. The poet fell from recompense to music, skint her shin on hardware battened to this beescape. No defendant pleads. There is forgiveness here I want to say, but trains plunge south like Polaroids from basements where the whistling armies, locked in spite, perfect their burrows. Cheese, they say, and darkness smiles: the withered queen declines into a ribbon cities wear. In such constraints banks often close. I, in the air, reflect the waves Orion twists from matter’s flank, redemptive seiche—thin arrows that disturb the bees’ concise matriculations. Some queens demand Scriabin in the spring; some lay aside their gowns when chemistry inflects their careful apercus. It’s true, elections fly too close to furnaces we cannot see. Break this vase compunction says—now use one shard to fletch the wound, this orchard’s urban vantage strained from wax. Chyme decorates the analects with noxious dust. I claim: a theft, a hex, a wing. All queens and poets shape alike the same deserted algorithm. We entertain the mad. They whisper songs no traveler dares sing. —for Oni Buchanan