My father said honey ran down the wall in his boyhood home. It came around the metal plate covering the kitchen hole where the winter’s bellied stove attached to the chimney. He told me how when the air was cool and instinct inactive, he and my grandfather hunted with sure sticks and burlap bags.
From their squatted view they made quick, quiet scrapes in the inner chimney. The heavy catch stirred strangeness and warmed fear; it did not know there were hands at the neck of the bag. The bag was tied and held away from the body. My father was alone in the basement when he placed it in the furnace. The door was shut; the coal and its castle closed. When the sack burned, it opened. It rotted like a kitchen blossom. There was the burning of flight, and nothing but the flame to fly into.
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Gary Scott‘s work has appeared in the Northwest Review, A Gathering of Poets (Kent State University Press) and is forthcoming in Yellow Silk. He received his MA from Western Washington University, where he was Managing Editor of the Bellingham Review.