WASP BUZZING AND WATER SHEDDING, JIMMY GROWING WET
On their porch, where Jimmy and his dad they sometimes sit and watch the sun go down, watch the night come on, there are pockets of open space like shallow pools, and Jimmy, sometimes it is his job to get out the hose and put his thumb on the end and force the wasps' nests from those places.
Jimmy has a storage of bees in his stomach, and they re-tune his whole body as he goes, walks, looking for his mother who has entirely gone and will never come back. Jimmy's mother, split in half by a train, disintegrating, alcohol flames sparking through her momentarily, eating away the grey in her lungs.
Sitting, watching the sun turn into the moon, a pale and quick time when his dad, Jimmy's father, he is not searching the drips of faucet water for the face of his wife, for Jimmy's mother, for a world that can be put back together, reshaped into a livable season.
The wasps, they nest in this porch, their porch, because these are places out of the sun and the wind and the rain and high enough that kids with sticks, like friends, if Jimmy had friends, if the friends that Jimmy doesn't have were to treat the porch like a piñata, those sticks wouldn't reach this kind of nest that these wasps have built.
Jimmy, his hands hold the hose. The water, rushing out, it is a beacon, galloping in his head.
The nests, the homes of wasps, they are made of paper. And Jimmy, he would like nothing more than to take down those nests, carefully with his hands, feeling the sting and wiping the wasps away, brushing their wings with his knuckles, and unfolding that paper and reading the words written there. Your mother is coming back it would say, when Jimmy he stretched it open. Of if Jimmy found the inside of this nest and there were no words written, there was no message and no lines, he would take out a pencil, one from the cup on his desk in his bedroom in this town, and Jimmy, he would write a love letter to himself on the inside. And Jimmy, he would wad it back together and stick it again to the holes in their porch, in their hearts, waiting for the new arrival of more wasps.
The water washes the bees, tugs their wings into puddles.
Jimmy and his father at night, one night, watching the sun go into its summer hills, the moon mirroring back, the locust noises.
Dissidence is what Jimmy hears. Dissonance is what Jimmy hears, his mother stroking the hair from his forehead, no words issuing from her lips, those lips, a perfect nest for him to paper down in.
--(La Petite Zine, 2009)
