By Joanne Dominique Dwyer

This is not a poem about insects of the family Hymenoptera.
It’s not a poem about pounding nails.
It’s not a poem about flashlight tag.
It’s not a poem about famous writers addicted to laudanum.
This is not a poem about the burial of a baby raccoon.
This is not a poem about the core of the sun becoming unstable
   and everything going black and cold.
This is not a poem about the definition of Hymenoptera.
Hymenoptera: derived from the ancient Greek words
hymen and pteron—membrane and wing.
This is not a poem begun in silence.
Before dawn the wolf dogs howling inside the pen.
And a 5:30 am text from a man who says another man
entered his bedroom while he slept—
   and a threat of beating the intruder to death.
This is not a poem about cannonball splashing.
This is not a poem about the softening and weakening of bones in children.
It’s not a poem about parachutes
It’s is not a poem about being born in a field of horses.
This is not a poem about oxygen.
It is a poem about the migration
   of ruby-throated birds and the effects
of artillery on tongues.

Joanne Dominique Dwyer has two poetry collections: Rasa, chosen by David Lehman for the Marsh Hawk Prize (2022), and Belle Laide (Sarabande Books, 2013). She is a Rona Jaffe Award-winner and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Dwyer was also included in Best American Poetry 2019. She has been a visiting poet to elders with memory loss and, through support from the Witter Bynner Foundation, a poetry facilitator to adolescents in New Mexico. She is also a ceramics artist.