THE TENDERNESS OF BEES by Vicki Graham

ISBN 978-1-890193-82-9
97 pages
5" x 8"
Trade paper edition with French fold cover

What is gone leaves traces
in the wind, an emptiness
like a mould only one bird fits.
Audubon's Eskimo Curlew:
head cocked, the male studies
the female lying belly up.
And when the page is turned,
the book closed, do they rise
together from the dunes,
resume their elliptical migration
across the hemispheres?

from 'Lost Bird' in The Tenderness of Bees (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008)

Vicki Graham teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Her chapbook, Alembic, published by Red Dragonfly Press, 2001, was a finalist for the Book Award. In the summer of 2006, she was a writer in residence at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. Her writings on the forest have become part of the Long Term Ecological Reflections archive, preserved at Oregon State University in Corvallis.