Buzzing/Ways to Confirm You’ve Seen Them

By Jacqueline Modungo

Yellow Jacket striding across the room

You’re a familiar face, aren’t you?

Every time someone approaches
I can almost feel the doors move
I peer across the volumes
Between the shelves
Between the bars
But maybe the track playing in my ears
Is just coloring my view
And yet, I topple the bookcase
On a half-bored, half-dependent
Chase towards the color

Your presence
only lasted a few seconds

Familiar,
Almost

I want to hold the seconds
in my hands again

I just want to know it wasn’t my imagination

Even if it stings

Clamor into the stairwell

Even when the only rush
comes from the flood of histamines

My own frenzied footsteps

The speed of sound
packs a punch

Volleyed back against me
By the marble

The moment it decides
to finally catch up

And here comes the Hum

I knew your laugh like a composition
Some days, that memory thaws from the freeze

Of what I now understand to be the
Bumble Bee

You are soft
when you’re out of sight

It knows I sense its presence
It wants me to be following

When you passed through the room
you know I knew
what you were doing

I make my way down sighing steps
Well-walked, worn stone

I’d stop asking, if I could
But unfinished phrases always get the best of-

Of frantic footpaths before me

Always being willing to run
can make a woman tired.

The bumble bee falls silent
My eyes are the only thing listening

Movement. Color. Shape.
Mean nothing
When faced with haunted grieving

And there in the lower level I see it

Might as well be an apparition

Light
A Firefly blinking against
A water fountain

As delicate as my childhood backyard
with a sliver of the sun still out

Finding delight in
Finally being found

Ideations date themselves in silence
You style your hair different now

I approach in sets of two cautious steps

please don’t fly away again

And wonder what I should do now

Ricocheted echoes
from a pulse once quickened

Now that what I know

Somehow, faint remembrance
Doesn’t feel like reconciliation

Is no longer what I imagined

Now that I’m here
I know there was no plan