CLOVER HONEY — CHRISTINE BARKLEY
/Suddenly no one can stop talking about rebirth and renewal. Spring cleaning in attics, in basements; searching for fresher air and finding the windows stuck closed. The allergists are booked solid and so are the psychiatrists, but there is no treatment for this season’s disease. Everyone is drunk on shots of clover honey. Everyone is weeping over the little April lambs; the smallest so achingly small; the ones who can’t walk quite yet and still try to run. Everyone is sobbing helplessly over the spores that come to us on the wind and pollinate our sinuses for months, leaving us raw and teary, as asexual as the sexual parts of plants.
But it’s all worth it, we say to each other, over each other, isn’t it, for the bloom? Poppies doping the foothills, algae suffocating the lakes. We can’t shut up about it. We can only speak in the desperate code of new beginnings and second chances and no, we can’t stop weeping; we’ve tried. But it’s worth it, we keep saying, isn’t it? The bloom; the newborn lambs in fields of clover; the endlessly looping visuals of endlessly waving grassland. Soothing as swallowing another ounce of honey. Soothing as anything could be when not one of us has been outside since last season at least; more likely another year altogether; another age that we don’t remember.
I’m not blaming the poppies or the pollen, but I can’t think of an age that I do remember. I know that fifteen years ago I had never seen a poppy and the doctors still thought that there might be a cure. Maybe I was sixteen for just a moment too long. What was the bloom like that year; what kinds of flowers choked the hillside? Was it worth it, right up until they died? Maybe I was a child once, so briefly, and so small that I made everyone cry.
Christine Barkley is an artist and writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her writing explores themes of chronic illness, trauma, and nature. When not writing, she can be found wandering in the woods and baking too many cupcakes. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Rust and Moth, CLOVES, and elsewhere.
