Wasp

I’m nearly forehead to forehead with her
as I lean in towards the picture window;
her conical, dichromatic-schemed body shifts
in the early sun. Wasp on the soft metal screen—
with two glass-like wings, amber colored, the color
of a dark bottle, and two burnt-orange antennae
like satellite probes adjusting and readjusting in the stiff air.
Small mechanics of this organic thing that’s been sheltering
in a dark crevice for seven months now. It’s been a while,
so it feels good to think about something other than the narrow attic
of myself, to think instead of a thing I would have at least known
as a girl to fear. She really is wasp-waisted like the waists
I used to imagine on hipless Anglo-Saxon women,
women who drank only clear liquids,
owned a pinched and bitter abdomen. Leaning closer now,
I see her eyes cover almost her entire head. What
must it be like to perceive the world that way:
all sight and motion, all quest for sweetness,
all sense of impermanence untaught and no language
with which to slash one thing from another, no language—
so that even alone in the dark asylum of a curtain
or a shutter she has no means of marking
how one thing ends and another begins, no means
with which to banish the flower from the self.

Genevieve Payne holds an M.F.A. from Syracuse University where she was the 2019 recipient of the Leonard Brown Prize in poetry. Her work as recently appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and RHINO.