May long weekend
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
As if magnified, a hornet lies dead
by the baffling window
ridiculously detailed and weightless
in the new breeze, shifting.
Another dies nearby, tightens
to a comma then straightens, repeating
on a Domino’s flyer I use to take it outside.
I doubt it survived there.
This happened another May:
emerging in the old, cold room
taken in by green seen through glass,
the house stuffed solid with the shut-up noise
of their oversized hopelessness.
Kate Bonfield lives and works in Dorset.