to the bee crawling on Maya Angelou’s book
by Sharisa Aidukaitis

sure I suppose you can read along,
traversing pathways of love and aspiration
and tasting sublimely crafted phrases,
except your presence makes me queasy
and the lyrical ink is starting to swim
so I wonder if you could fly down the street
just a mile, that would be enough distance,
and while you’re there, perhaps you might
skirt over the prison wall with a nonchalant
mobility foreign to us bipeds
and carry a hello to someone’s brother
to a tiny someone’s daddy, although they
might not welcome your presence,
unable as you are to recite the poetry
you crept across

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Sharisa Aidukaitis is a writer and college educator in upstate New York. Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Penstricken, Moss Piglet, The Quarter(ly), Drifting Sands Haibun, Sublimation, and others.

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Artist Statement: Nourishment for the mind and heart are essential to a life well lived. For me, this nourishment is most frequently found in both nature and poetry, and when those two elements are combined their potency grows exponentially. I revel in quiet moments where I can retreat from the unceasing motion of modernity and sit in nature reading a book of poetry. In my poem here, I seek to capture both the breathtaking stillness of moments in nature and the mental transcendence of poetry, often leading me to grapple with social or existential conflicts.

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Featured Image: Photo by Mark Timberlake, 2020