Everything About the Wasp Except Why

by Gareth Prunty

Out on the rim of sleep I dream myself
a dropped stitch in the nether hem of time,
morphed to a noose on an icy sliding shelf
in the past’s morgue, a case of cold-case crime...
until the noose-strands turn to stripes, and then 
the busy buzz of hymenoptera wing
powers the train of head and abdomen,
thorax and venomous caboose of sting.

Though males are said to go unarmed, a sigh 
as sharp nails tease my swollen sting. I wake;
the vespal woman spreads her legs; we lie
in the blood’s thrum, and what she gives I take, 
then sink back into dream, where once more I
shall hear no word nor whisper of the why.