The first man who shared my body after my husband left was thirty, never married; young enough to see in me something trouble-free. He worked hard: weeks of texting before I let him pour me a glass of wine. As he undressed me I asked, what do you see? and he chose to compliment a shoulder, a thigh; not my stretch-marked belly nor my breasts, drooped with age . . . until I realized  he had never met a bowlful of bees, fig pollen heavy, a teardropped plum with a center a thousand drone strong, and ready to fizz and just like that I squirted an arc of honey like an alabaster wave above the bed—mine to harvest, mine alone to take back to the hive. After we dressed, the young man piled the bedding into a bag and asked me to throw it in the dumpster on my way out. And I did. Not unhappily. I was tended, after all, overfull with the knowledge that my old body would still manage magical things; I laid that bag next to empty pop bottles and rotting fruit that buzzed—still—with bees.

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This poem first appeared in McQueen’s Quinterly Journal

http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ14/Neve-Midbar-Younger-Men.aspx