falls down and down and down onto
the tops of my fingers. i turn my hand,
bring my palm to the sky, like the leaves
of trees do when they smell the weather turning.

the world is loud. out of focus.
full of unintentional bitterness.
homegrown, organic sharpness.
a seemingly-never-ending cycle
of pain and apprehension and grief.
like when you put a record on,
place the needle in the first groove,
but its surface is already scratched.
so it turns, and you expect to hear
whatever soothing song you’d chosen,
and instead it scratches, still revolving,
still skipping every beat, what you
see and what you hear out of sync.
like standing too close to a wood stove,
the pop of the flames startling you
less and less every time.

like the pop of your inner ear
as the plane takes off, leaving
a piece of yourself on the tarmac.

i used to believe
that if i stood close enough to a fire,
my skin would inherit its glow. its radiance.

you’ll find your record that plays.
you’ll know, inherently, which corner
of your room collects the most sunlight.

and when the stars seem to shine
for everyone in the world but you,
remember it’s because you make your own light.

I’m not allergic to bee stings – I never have been, I probably never will be – but I am more afraid of bees than anything else. More afraid than heights, than fire, than opening up to others, than death by drowning. I have been stung more times than I will ever be able to count. My skin has since grown thicker, but I remember when it was soft, and I was small. I used up the entire allowance of pain I was given for life in less than four minutes.
Perhaps I should specify that it’s not bees that I am afraid of, but wasps.
When I was nine years old, much younger than I am now, I stepped on a yellow jacket nest. My bare foot went into the hole and came out covered in their little striped bodies. There was this buzzing noise that at the time I’d thought was normal, but I now know that it was the sound of the wasps that were in my ears. They had been trying to crawl down my ear canals. I wonder if they had mistaken my canals for their burrows, and had been trying to get back to their queen, but were disappointed to find my ear drums, instead.
My sister – the same age – covered in wasps alongside me, screamed and screamed, but I made no noise. By the time I even thought to cry, I had been stung so many times it would have been pointless to weep for my swollen, red toes. I remember being unable to feel the wasps’ venom running through my veins because I couldn’t even feel my veins. If I would have cried for anything, it would have been for fear that, being unable to feel them, I might have lost track of my tiny feet. They could have walked away without my body and I wouldn’t have known. They could have walked to school and back without me.
Of course, my feet could barely walk. After my initial disgust, I watched my sister run away from where we had been standing and I knew that I should run, too. I could still feel the wasps crawling, clamoring, on my skin, in my clothes, in my hair. I remember the feeling of these bees crawling around among the roots of my hair, making themselves well-acquainted with the tender skin of my scalp. I remember being unable to get them all out of my hair before I walked into the house.
I knew that I should run, and so, balanced precariously on my numbed feet, clambered after her.
I followed my screaming sister down to our farmhouse, past my stepmother who was also screaming, even louder than my sister. I don’t remember where my father was that day.
We ran down the dirt road that led from the barns to our house, removing our shirts as we went and stopping to strip down to our underwear on the front porch. I remember the honks from cars as they passed by. I remember not knowing why they were honking, but knowing that I was angry with them for honking, for ogling, rather than stopping to help. I remember not knowing how they would help, just knowing that I needed help, desperately.
The irony of our stings is that my sister, a year later, was cast in our school’s operetta, and ended up playing the part of a yellow jacket, a sort of elementary-school-gangster, part of a group of them, who wore – you guessed it – yellow jackets and stole other bugs’ lunch money. I would say that, if the wasps that attacked me had been human, they would definitely have been after the money I used to buy Little Debbie Oatmeal Crème Pies in the lunchroom.
If I had been stung even three years later, I would have been big enough to know that one doesn’t run around in untrimmed grass with no shoes on their feet for precisely this reason. If I had been stung three years earlier, I would have been too small, and dead. So I am grateful for even the smallest of coincidences, the tiny droplet of fate that had given me those stings on that day, at that age.


I would like to talk about pain transference. In your body, nerves often run between parts of yourself you never thought would be connected. If something hurts in your elbow, it wouldn’t shock you to find that your fingers hurt as well, but if your elbow hurt and so did your lower spine? You’d be a little confused.
This is pain transference.
It’s a form of generalized pain; you can locate the pain, it’s just not coming from any one place. You can feel the pain in more than one part of your body, though there’s no reason for anything other than your elbow to ache. This is also your body’s way of protecting you from pain. It’s not that this pain is more manageable, but that it is easier to understand. Your elbow might be more hurt than the ache lets on, but you can’t tell, because your lower back is throbbing.
Now imagine your body as a hive of wasps. Imagine each of these wasps as a nerve inside of said hive-body. Imagine the queen as this hive-body’s brain. What is your body’s goal? To protect the brain. What is a hive’s goal? To protect the queen. Each wasp is born with an instinctual dedication to the queen. They must protect this individual at all costs. Your body, on the other hand, does everything it possibly can to protect the part of you that makes you so unbearably you.
Yellow jackets are social creatures. Each wasp has its own purpose in the hive, and the three different ranks within this hierarchy are the queen, the drones, and the workers. The queen (who is the only member of the colony equipped by evolution to survive the winter; every other wasp is dispensable) lays eggs and fertilizes them using stored ***** from the spermatheca. Her only purpose is to reproduce. Occasionally the queen will leave an egg unfertilized, and this egg will develop into a male drone whose only purpose is also reproduction. The female workers are arguably the most important part of the hive. They build and defend the nest.
Only female yellow jackets are capable of stinging, and wasps will only sting if their colony is disturbed. This fact is new and interesting to me. I remember thinking that it would make so much sense if the only wasps in the colony who could sting were the females. Females have a motherly, nurturing nature about them, but they are protective and willing to make sacrifices as well. Lo and behold.
The females are the nerves. They transfer the pain from the queen to themselves (and then, if disturbed, to the third-party individual who has disturbed them).
Psychics view pain transference as the transferring of pain between bodies rather than the transferring of pain between separate parts of the same body, but it works in a very similar way. Different types of energy vibrate at different frequencies; loving energy vibrates at a higher frequency than dark energy, therefore they transfer between people at different rates. Pain is simply dark energy that holds a fatalistic power over us.
According to psychics, energy can be transferred through the mind, the body, and the spirit, but pain is mostly transferred through physical touch. To transfer pain to another human being, you must touch them in a way that is not beneficial to their own or your spiritual growth.


I would like to talk about smallness. I was nine when I was stung by these yellow jackets. I was nine and the first time I’d ever been stung was at a friend’s birthday party at maybe the age of seven, behind the knee, and it’d swelled up so large I couldn’t bend my knee for two days. I knew the dangers of disturbing wasp nests; I’d watched my friends all through elementary school getting stung on the wooden playground on the premises. I, myself, stuck to swing-sets and splinters.
I was always so careful. I never went near trees if I saw a nest in its branches. My teachers had told me that I should stay away from the part of our playground made up of tires, because the hornets liked to nest in the rubber. I was terrified of being stung again after that first time because all the mud in the world didn’t seem to make a difference. The wasp’s venom, even after drying up pile after pile of soft, wet dirt, made my limb stiff and sore. I was always so careful; it seems appropriate that the one time I’d been careless, I’d been stung enough times to make up for all the times I had avoided wasps as if my life had depended on it. Maybe it had.
I was small enough when I was nine. If I had been stung at six, or three, I would have been in a lot more trouble. I would have been in a lot more pain. At nine, my stings required calamine lotion and mud for the venom, and ice baths for the swelling. At six, they might have required a trip to the hospital. At three, they would have been much more alarming, considering I had never been stung by a bee by that age.
I was careless. It was summer and I was old enough to wear denim shorts and I had kicked off my flip flops so I could feel the grass under my feet and I was careless and I was punished for it. Now I watch my cousins and my niece play outside and I have to hold my tongue, remember that I am not responsible, that I cannot prevent their being stung, their stings, no matter how badly I want to.
I would like to talk about fate. I would like to talk about how, if I hadn’t been running barefoot, I wouldn’t have gotten stung so badly. I would like to talk about how if my father had been around to tell me not to run barefoot, at least my feet would have been safe. How, if I hadn’t been too stubborn to listen to my stepmom, too, I probably would have had shoes on. How, regardless of all of these things, I probably would have been stung no matter what.
In a world where people are stung by hornets every day – where people are stung by as many as I was, at once – I would like to say that I know now that this experience is not as unique as I had previously thought it to be. I know more people than I thought I did whose trauma involves insects smaller than their pinky finger but together cover their whole body, and venom. I know people who, when I tell them I was stung by hundreds of yellow jackets at the age of nine, shrug and say nonchalantly, “Hey, me too.”
I would like to talk about smallness, and fate. I would like to talk about not only physical smallness, but the smallness one feels when they are in pain.
Belittled might be the word I am looking for. My pain wasn’t belittled, per se, but my pain belittled me.
My pain made me feel small. My pain made me feel small when I was stripping my clothes off on my front porch, cars racing by on the state highway that ran past my house. When I was running my fingers through my hair under the faucet in my kitchen sink because my sister was older and always got first dibs on the shower. As these wasps that hadn’t suffocated under my hair stung my fingers, too, until they were as swollen as my toes. My pain made me feel small when it made me pity myself.


I would like to talk about standing up for yourself as an act of causing pain.
Honeybees, when they sting, are defending themselves and their queen, but they don’t know that when they sting, it will become lodged underneath the skin of whomever they sting and it will pull them apart and they will die.
I imagine the first time a wasp stings to be a sort of power trip. Female wasps can – and will – sting repeatedly to protect the colony. I also imagine they don’t know that their relative the honeybee dies after it stings, but it must be strange for them, nonetheless.
Have you ever seen a video of a woman protecting herself and those she loves? She’s vicious. She won’t stop until the perpetrator has retreated.
When a woman stands up for herself, though, it’s as if she’s tearing herself in half.
A woman standing up for herself is a dangerous thing, both dangerous for her and for those around her. It is an act of bravery and defiance and saving grace all in one.
A few weeks ago, I overheard someone equate being female with being terminally ill, as if we have no place to go but down. As if we are dying creatures, on our last leg of life, with no will to fight for what we want.
As if the pain of the world is being transferred into us all at once.
I would like to argue that it is the exact opposite. There is nothing more alive and breathing than femaleness.I am inseparable from my femaleness. I am inseparable from the that leaks from me when I think of all of the times I have been harmed But I am not inseparable from the pain that I have caused others. I cannot forget that.


I like to imagine sometimes what my stings would have been like if I had gotten them ten years later, as well. I am much bigger. I am much stronger. I am much more capable of handling pain than my nine-year-old counterpart.
I wish I could have been the one to have to handle that pain. I wish my nine-year-old self had known better than to let her foot fall into a yellow jacket nest. I think it’s unfair that, at such an early age, I had to deal with something so terrifying and painful and traumatic. My extremities were swollen for over a week. I couldn’t write, I could close the zipper on my backpack, I couldn’t turn the pages of a book. I couldn’t go to school, and I couldn’t read in bed, so it might be enough to say that the week I was kept out of school to elevate my legs and let the swelling go down was the most boring week of my entire life.
Sometimes I look at my ankles, swollen from blood flow, from standing too long or from sitting too long or from doing anything except elevating them, and I’m reminded of this time when my ankles were much thinner and I watched them on the end of the couch, my toes pointing toward the ceiling. I remember how terrified my mom was. I imagine that phone call must have been harrowing for her – Hi, Michelle, Em’s been hurt. No, she’s fine. Just a few bee stings is all. – and for her to see me for the first time, red and splotchy and itching myself like mad must have been even more so.
I think about my father’s reaction, how I hadn’t been around to see it, but how he must have been heartbroken at knowing he wasn’t there to protect me, to prevent the bees from attacking me. I believe, however, that there was no protecting me, that there was no preventing these wasps from defending their home against me, an infiltrator. I had stepped inside of their burrow and was instantly seen as a threat. Anything I see as a threat to myself, I instantly want to rid myself of.
This is the way of the world: we see something, we determine it to be good or bad, and we either bring it into our lives or defend ourselves from it depending upon which it turns out to be. I happened to be the ultimate evil in these wasps’ lives. They were simply protecting their queen, without whom their hive would no longer exist. I was dark energy, vibrating in a way that spoke to them as threatening. I was transferring pain to them when my foot stepped into the hole, and they were transferring it back to me when they stung me. I transferred energy into the ground as my feet thumped against it. Water transferred energy into me as it helped me rinse wasps out of my hair.
From pain to protection to pity, back to pain. From bee stings to womanhood to sadness and back again. One shouldn’t be afraid to introduce the things they’ve lost to the things they’ve loved, or the things they love to the things they’re afraid of. And I am afraid of wasps. Petrified, even. The other day, driving in my car, I rolled the window down and in, immediately, flew a yellow jacket. I watched as it she flew past me and then around the back of my head. I heard her and was immediately transported back in time. I wondered what she was doing in my car, so far from her queen. I wondered what was in my car that she possibly could have wanted. But I knew that she wasn’t there to hurt me, because I hadn’t invaded her home. I hadn’t made an attack on her queen. I knew there was no sense in panicking, so I didn’t. I didn’t panic.
I am afraid of things even though they won’t **** me, but I have watched myself face these fears. I have stumbled onto a Ferris wheel and then walked confidently off. I have left candles lit without standing to check on them after every episode of The Office I watch. I have loved people I never thought I would, and I have seen the other side.

10:13 am. A text from you: what time are we leaving for Cornell? I’m embarrassed by your apparent lack of enthusiasm so I overcompensate with emojis, enough for you and I both. Three hours later I pick you up from your driveway, turn my music down, and hope to God you don’t hear which boyband I had been listening to. You get in and immediately fill up the entire passenger seat. You grow and grow and fold your right leg over your left until it’s encroaching upon my personal space and you turn the music up a little and then reach to roll down the window (to grow some more, I guess) and I have to tell you that my window won’t roll back up if rolled down and you acknowledge this but grow even more anyway, regardless of the fact that there’s nowhere else for you to go.
We’re awkward for a few minutes. This was to be expected considering our first few interactions had been drunken arm touches and Snapchats asking where are you? on nights we wanted to find each other even though we had no right to know where the other was. Then you break the silence, and we talk about where we’re from and where we want to go, and suddenly it’s not so awkward anymore. This is a conversation I feel like I’ve had before. I can envision conversations with you for miles to come. This is a conversation that makes a forty-five-minute car ride feel like five.
When we finally make it to Cornell, it’s 2:17pm and we decide to walk around a bit, together, to help you get your bearings. You can hardly contain your excitement when you see the baseball field – it’s endearing. We split up once we’ve finished our tour of Lincoln Hall, which is, appropriately, the music building. I leave you and walk around campus before finally settling in Goldwin Smith to journal for the fifty minutes before it’s time to meet back up. I’ve lied to you – you don’t know that the only reason I’m in Ithaca with you is to be with you, but I think it’s better that you don’t know.
2:46pm. I’m having fun with Peter. He’s cool. My journal tells a story I’d never be able to say to your face – I enjoy the time I’ve spent with you, though it’s limited and I know I’ll never have time like this with you again. This connection that I seem to have made has pushed my anxiety down into a part of me that it hasn’t seen it a while. Being here for today has been good for my soul … I feel good right now. These are words my journal hasn’t heard from me since at least April. Today has been a lot less awkward than I thought it would be I thought it would be a lot harder to just hang out, one on one, yet here we are. It’s really hard to be uncomfortable/an anxious mess around him.
I think about the stop sign that I almost ran in front of the admissions building, on our way to park at the Schoellkopf garage. I think about seeing my ex-boyfriend in front of the philosophy building. I think about the dance class I interrupted when I was trying to write poetry in the science building.
You text me and we meet in front of the statue of Ezra Cornell. I hardly recognize you, in your flannel, your legs crossed, on a bench, and I realize that I’ve never seen you sitting down. You make a phone call and I pretend not to eavesdrop but I can’t help it. I’m admiring the professional tone you adopt, watching people go by, wondering if they think we’re a couple, but we’re not sitting close enough for anyone to think that.
3:47 pm. We walk from the Arts Quad to Collegetown Bagels and I think that maybe you’ll offer to pay for my meal – I don’t know why I think this – but you don’t. You follow my lead, walking up to the counter to order your bagel. You decide to try the Big Sur because that’s what I tell you is my favorite on the menu, and I feel a warmth radiate outward from the center of my body until I’m sure I must be leaking happiness from my fingertips. I know then that this day won’t have been a waste of time in any way.
You ask questions and I respond, my mouth full of apples and honey and cheese, and I’m grateful that you don’t think any less of me for talking with my mouth full. I ask questions and you respond, bashfully, blissfully unaware of how intrigued I am by your every answer. I drink my Hubert’s Lemonade – mango flavored – and you drink yours, a brand called Nantucket’s Nature. The cap has a fact about whales on it, something about how hundreds of them live in the waters surrounding Nantucket, and you get excited, cleaning it off, gushing about how you’d like to give this to a certain Moby ****-obsessed professor.
4:31pm. The Ithaca Commons during Apple Fest is more hectic than I’m used to, but we make it all the way down to Taste of Thai and then back to the playground before deciding on a destination. As we meander you ask me if I’ve ever dated a boy shorter than me. I blush knowing my negating answer will make me seem vain. I catch your grin with my own and we walk into Autumn Leaves, a used bookstore.
We talk about The Hobbit and David Sedaris and my favorite poets and poems and I buy Dracula, because it’s four dollars and because I’m so intoxicated with adrenaline that I can’t not. I learn that your favorite movie is Fever Pitch because, honestly, why wouldn’t it be. We leave the bookstore, my backpack a little heavier and my heart a little lighter. We should be holding hands, I think, and immediately I’m terrified you can read my mind but I know there’s no way that’s possible.
As it’s Apple Fest, you claim it’s only appropriate that we eat an apple each, even though I’m pretty sure I’m allergic and I’ve had more than enough apples already that day. You offer up two dollars in quarters to the man behind the stand and ask what he’d recommend. He turns our attention to the resident apple expert, who asks what our favorite apples are, and you tell her that mine is Fuji. I don’t remember telling you this about myself. We are told to try an apple called ***’s Orange Pippin, and we’re intrigued until we find the basket – it’s full of ugly apples. The apples we do eat are too sweet, too big, and we can’t finish them. We laugh together – what if those apples, the ugly ones, the ones too ugly for us to eat, were the best apples of the bunch? We tell each other that we’re *******. We’re *******. We just stereotyped those apples! How could we do that?
We duet “Africa” by Toto as we leave Ithaca, the sun warming my face, your laugh filling the car. On the ride home we talk, more than we did on the drive down to Ithaca. You ask if I’ve watched Doctor Who and I smile because there’s no way you can’t read my mind, at this point. I tell you about the T.A.R.D.I.S. shirt I saw on the Commons and how I almost asked, but I didn’t, in your words, want to sound like a ******* nerd. We talk music and I find out you’re a Beatles fan who’s never seen Across the Universe so I ask you to play “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” and as we sing along it dawns on me how this would seem if we were in a romantic comedy. I’ve just seen a face. I can’t forget the time or place where we’ve just met.
7:41pm. It wasn’t a date. It wasn’t a date. It wasn’t a date, I tell myself as we pull back onto school property. You’ll be getting out of my car soon, my car you just helped me name, and you’ll be heading back to your apartment to catch up on Saturday night drinking, and I’ll be scaling the hill to the athletic center to watch my friends kick each other’s ***** in a game of unprofessional basketball. We’ll go back to our lives that probably will never intertwine again – and maybe they weren’t meant to in the first place. As I walk back to my room, I’m hit by how exhausted I am. I’m hit by how hard I must have been working without even realizing to seem like a normal human being, one whose brain isn’t constantly trying to keep them from going outside. I’m a firm believer in having to work for what you want, and I worked for you, but maybe I didn’t work hard enough. Or maybe I’m working for the wrong person.

in another universe there is more money in
my savings account than in my checking. i’m
full of fruit and fruitfulness and there is sun
shining straight out of my chest. the plants
water themselves – and then they water me,
whispering positive affirmations, reassuring
my heart that it can keep beating. full of love
for myself is a state in which i’d like to exist.

i’ve been the one to pick myself up off
the ground far too many times. i’m tired.
it’s beyond time for it to be someone
else’s job.

in this universe, this one right here, i button
my jeans, pulling my sneakers over the backs
of my heels, and i leave you behind. you keep
part of me, too, but i don’t need her anymore.

in another universe you love me back and
i don’t even have to say pretty please.

Who would I be? If I were, say, the opposite of me. Would I be someone stronger? Faster? Someone more apt to speak out in front of a crowd? Even more apt to speak up in front of my friends? Would I be the first one to a party, and the last to leave? Would I know how to cook an egg without having to call my mother? Would I actually buy eggs in the first place? I think I would be less afraid of what my doctor has to say every time she finishes my yearly check-up. If I were the opposite of me, I’d be able to make the appointment without a pre-phone-call thirty-minute pep talk.