Bee
by Perrin Carrell
Perrin Carrell

Perrin Carrell is an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Exquisite Corpse Annual, Ophelia Street, The Coachella Review, and GC Advocate, among others. He is also the founder and director of the community-published poetry magazine, allwritethen (www.allwritethen.org).

A little fear,
this bee on my chest. Dad told me
he was addicted to meth for years and that he was sorry.

That was a long time ago. Now it all makes sense
about his teeth. In the park the tightrope walkers
have stolen the only trees. We are forced to eat our pizza

in the sun, too close to the baseball game. You are scared
of fly balls. I am scared my childhood was a production. Dad
loaded bombs on planes and got PTSD. Once they tried

to take his benefits away and he raised so much hell they gave
them back. That was the first time he used Wikipedia. Once in the car
he said, I struggle with racism; I still hate Vietnamese people, and that

was all he said during that car ride. He has never talked about his war.
He only hints at it. A few times, looking at scraps of metal in the shop,
supervising me, he's said, Be careful; you should see what something like that

can do to a body. I found out recently he was shot down and lost in the jungle
for three days, and that makes the meth addiction a little more okay. You go on
to the fountain. Homeless people playing chess. Even after you are gone

I think of honey.

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