Nests I've Made

I've been working on a series of nests for a project I am doing for myself. Each is for a person that has felt like home at one time or another. Each nest has their hair in it and mine too. There will be about eight of them total, I think. The final part will be a nest big enough to fit two people inside. And I'm attaching the names to them because that is horrifying and scary.

poem 12: The Nest

The Nest

The home was a threat before the hornets froze out in this year’s short winter. Since December I watched the nest deaden. In March I cut the branches from the tree.
It was the weight from the shell that made my body
ache and the caved wall in the side of the beast
that exposed its thousand eyes, the jealous lover.


With its eyes, its shell, its wanting,
the old hive made me a woman.
So now I can eulogize
half the population with:
she was a woman too.
Meaning: we are organs
and all the keys are down.


I learn yearly how to love.
This usually happens at the start
of fall. Now I am half way through
the year and I am hungry.

*

Reading about hornets, I learn the queen
can survive through the harshest months
in a slumber. I learn she is home and bodied.

-marlo barrera, march 2010