Honey Tasting
By Lucian Mattison
- Comox, BC
A beekeeper now, she arranges a line of ambers, glass columns that glow under dining table lights lead us through five jarred hillsides. We spin threads of honey on wooden skewers, drip tumbling over itself before binding back into its globe. I twist a bee box onto my tongue—field of fireweed, radiant spice— the heat of a specific time and sun packed into nectar. It’s been a decade since we last spoke, again telling myself the same story about these friendships formed abroad, the past informing our devotion to the present moment, to not measure meaning against time elapsed, but in these hours immersed in the new and familiar flavor. I still ask her to forgive me for falling off the map. Slight hesitance melts across the tongue, turns to warmth. She tells me to put the apology away. We are here, together, and that is cause for celebration, as we uncap another jar from another time, break the skewer tip, dip into the next pot— a burnt amber from her mentor’s home, how she learned this new craft, and it’s like no time has passed at all. Delightfully baffled, I never knew honey could taste so different, every break of the skewer a passkey into another field and season—a basket of almond flowers, this pear that bleeds its sugars from the stem like fresh spring water. We taste through each jar, honey-stomached. I lean back in my chair like a fat bumblebee balanced on a coneflower that dips with my weight, the night a frame, heavy with honey, pulled, scraped, and reset in the hive.
Lucian Mattison is a US-Argentinian poet and translator and the author of three books of poetry, Curare (C&R Press, 2022), 2023 International Latino Book Awards, Silver Medal Winner; Reaper's Milonga (YesYes Books, 2018); and Peregrine Nation (Dynamo Verlag, 2017). His work has won the Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize, nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in numerous journals, including The Adroit Journal, The Cincinnati Review, CutBank, Fugue, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Nashville Review, and The South Carolina Review. He received his MFA from Old Dominion University and is currently based out of Oakland, California.