Your brother is lost, my mother says, because we didn't believe
him.
          He told us there was loud humming inside the walls—Go to sleep, we said.
And he couldn't
                            couldn't go to sleep.
                          Yesterday, your father and I found dead bees inside the attic. Thousands.

Once, when he was still alive, I found a dead bee on the windowsill of our
bathroom.
                                                                               Not thinking much of it
             I swept it into the trash with my palm, a motion captured in the dust
like afterimage.
                                                    The next morning: a dead bee on the windowsill
                             the other still in the bin.
I told no one.
from the book ROOT FRACTURES / Scribner 
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Detail from a mediaeval illumination of a man and a woman clasoing hands
Renaissance Sonnets Not Only for Lovers

"Even Petrarch wrote about more than just his love for Laura. A number of his poems were composed for friends, with several of them for the Florentine poet Sennuccio del Bene. In poem 113, Petrarch writes about returning to the region where Laura was born, but he opens by describing his love for his friend, saying he is only 'half' himself without Sennuccio, and that both men would only be 'whole' and 'happy' if they were together."

viaATLAS OBSCURA
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Cover of Evie Shockley's book, Suddenly We
What Sparks Poetry:
Evie Shockley on Language as Form

"I found this truism (which seems to readily reproduce itself: 'one sin begets another,' 'one tragedy begets another,' 'one wedding begets another') bubbling up in my brain. If only one vote begat another in that inevitable way, I sighed, thinking of how hard it was to get women’s right to vote established as the law of the land—and of how long it was after that before Black women were able to exercise their 'women’s rights.'"
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