she might have watched the bees gather

around the plumes of goldenrod, flying

among clusters of marigolds and sprays

of cosmos, passing pollen between the flowers

while she watered them. If she was a gardener,

at the end of summer, as she tidied the spent blooms

and raked leaves over her flowerbeds to mulch them,

that grandmother of mine might have stooped

to see, between the fallen leaves, a honeybee—

its life spent too—and picked it up, and placed it

in a tin she’d saved. And in the winter months,

as she busied her hands with other things—

knitting, crochet, or tatting—she would glance

at that tin, which she kept on her dresser,

and think of the little body inside,

even pause her stitches long enough

to open its metal case, and study

the delicate pattern of its wings,

their own perfect lace. And by spring,

she had grown so enamored with that bee

and its wings, that as she tended her garden,

and as the bees tended her garden too,

she searched for another honeybee, and another still,

until at the end of that second season,

her tin was brimming with the bodies of bees

nestled carefully against each other

so as not to break their wings.

And though the next winter

would be as silent as any other,

sometimes she would still wonder

at the sound all those bees on top of her dresser

might have made in life, their pairs of wings

thrumming against each other, bending into flight.

And so each summer, she would fill another tin

with bees, and she would spend the winter

wondering about their lives, how it was

they had found her flowers, how far they’d flown,

what pasts had preceded them, what memories

they stored in their bodies or their hives.

The bees accumulated like questions

until they covered the top of her dresser

and began to fill her lingerie drawer below.

The collection continued to grow

until one winter, when her garden

was dormant beneath the leaves

and snow, when she, my grandmother,

opened each tin, and carried the bees

to her sewing table, spreading them out in rows,

all the bodies that had lived and died

hauling pollen through the seasons,

so many generations for each summer

of her own small life. She lifted a single bee

from its row, and plucked its wings,

then raised them to the light.

Their shape was like the petals of the flowers

that the bee had known, but their color

was frailer, the tint of aging silk

that turns transparent over time.

When she placed them side by side,

where the wings overlapped,

their color intensified into amber.

She plucked another pair of wings

and dotted the corners with glue,

joining them to make a tiny v,

and then she added another pair

and another, until she found a way

for those iridescent pieces to tesselate,

their patterns repeating outward

as a lattice of wings began to take shape.

Along the hem of this fine fabric,

she strung wings into delicate scallops

and daring swoops, then trimmed its top

with clusters of wings like unfurling fans.

As she worked, her breath caught the edges

of her elaborate tapestry, and the wings shivered,

suddenly alive. Only then did she lift

her lace from the table, draping it gently

across her shoulder blades, easing the fabric

past the hollows of her collarbones,

letting the last wings fall over her breasts.