Clade Song 5

Bees As Big As Elephants

“However, this was anything but a regular bee: in fact it was an elephant — as Alice soon found out, though the idea quite took her breath away at first.”

– Alice through the Looking Glass

I see the when
in which houses sway on stalks.
We will rise above them on bees as
big as elephants. The elephants will be no more,
and we will not miss them.
We will be small.
We will read the End Times and
manage genetic portfolios.
I will saddle up a winged
beast and make for the border.
Breaking through the bubble into
the place where there
is no oxygen, my blood may turn indigo and
gasp inside my veins, but the insect
will carry on, large as life, twice
as natural.

Ina Roy-Faderman is a born and bred Nebraskan of Bengali heritage who never did get the hang of doing things the proper way. She received her formal creative writing training while completing her MD at Stanford and starting a philosophy PhD at U.C. Berkeley. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Pif Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, Danny Shot’s Long Shot, The Silver Web, and Writer’s Digest, among others. In addition to writing, she teaches biomedical ethics for Oregon State University, entertains her spouse, child, and several other mammals in the SF Bay Area, and she plans on getting some sleep any day now.