COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER

by Gus Peterson

Stressed young bees that are forced to grow up too fast could largely account for disastrous declines in populations of the insects around the world, research suggests. Photograph: Qmul/PA --The Guardian, February 10, 2015

At first, it’s a funny thought:
worker bees leaning back from desks,

loosening neckties, rubbing that ache
between two disco ball eyes.

Drones discreetly opening
opaque bottles of pollen pills.

And everywhere the hexagonal:
the creaking swivel chair,

keys on the keyboard.
The ceiling tiles overhead.

Even love is a six leg scramble
with one winner.

No wonder the young fly out
into the geometry of the world

before rain is artillery,
the wind a map to home –

where death stings just once.


Gus Peterson lives in Maine alongside the Kennebec and works in sales.  Work has appeared various journals online and The Aurorean.  Recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his first chapbook, When The Poetry's Gone, is forthcoming this spring from Encircle Publications.

SCREE

by Corinne Lee

“Earlier this summer, President Obama worried about the disappearing honeybee population and what it means for the nation’s food supplies. In a presidential memorandum, he announced plans for the creation of a ‘Pollinator Health Task Force’ to help save the honeybee. . . . Well, not to worry, amazing robotic bees the size of pennies might one day pollinate crops, ending all concerns about Colony Collapse Disorder within the next 15-20 years. At Harvard, researchers led by Robert Wood are developing RoboBees—a completely mechanical flying device loaded up with sensors and batteries that would fly from flower to flower, picking up and then depositing pollen the way a real honeybee would.” —Dominic Basulto, “New RoboBees show that the future of robotics is very, very small,” The Washington Post, August 7, 2014. (Image from a National Geographic video.)

As bees lose home
and gills stiffen     warming warming—

our hunger hardens
to a graspish Devonian

jig. Yakety yak, few talk
back and most rasp, grating forth

a decree: Come, warm as the dead,
let’s pick the bee-fish

from our breath like swill—
                                             
      and eat
                             and eat.


Author's note: This poem responds to last week’s news stories about the likelihood that RoboBees will pollinate crops within the decade, due to a lack of real bees. I was appalled by the exuberant stories about this possibility. It seems to me that our rapacious appetites—easy to witness in a scree of everything from overfishing to global warming—are now dangerously matched by technology’s equally rapacious desire to “remedy” the consequences. This complex zero sum game results in further losses, yet the best solution is simple and obvious: reduce consumption, quickly.


Corinne Lee’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in dozens of literary magazines, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. Her book PYX won the National Poetry Series and was published by Penguin. Lee was chosen in 2007 by the Poetry Society of America as one of the top ten emerging poets in the United States, and six of her poems were included in Best American Poetry 2010. She was educated at U.S.C., the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (fiction), and U.T. Austin (poetry).