Honey Poems Novels & Stories

I open my basket and take out the honey. Honey is older than kings. Older than paper. Older than so many words people pretend are permanent. Honey does not rot. It simply becomes thicker, more itself, as years go by. I smear a thin line of honey on the tree’s bark in a spiral, slow and controlled. Not a symbol for a god. Not a plea. A simple offering to the oldest agreement there is: if you want the hedge to hold something, you feed it. Then I take the linen strip and wrap it around a low branch, tying it once, then twice, then three times.

Not after Killian assaulted a human. The girls and I have worked so hard. We built the bee hives. The herb garden. It took so long for the cuttings to sprout. We killed a lot before they took root. And then after we mastered growing them, there were the plagues: slugs, spider mites, whiteflies. One step forward, two steps back. Another honey vendor showed up one day, and they had dandelion honey and sourwood honey and all different types, not just clover. Then another showed up. Then every farmer had honey, and our profits hit the crapper.

“Nobody has beautiful feet.” “You do.” He kissed my ankle. My instep. The delicate bones along the top. “Everything about you is beautiful.” “That’s the honey talking.” “I haven’t opened the honey yet.” *Then he did. The lid twisted off with a soft pop, and the smell of wildflower filled the space between us. He drizzled a thin line along the top of my foot—cold, then warm as it met my skin—and lowered his mouth.* *His tongue was hot and slow and devastating. He licked the honey off in long, deliberate strokes, tracing every tendon, every bone, every inch of skin I’d never thought of as sensitive until his mouth was on it. I gripped the couch cushions and tried to remember how to breathe.*