Pesach Cascade Poem

These are desperate times—
The bees have given up on honey
and have turned to wine.
We are cleaning out our houses—

the cupboards were already empty.
The queen found a baby in a basket
and assumed he was for her.
These are desperate times,

and we keep saying it, though
it’s obvious—we’ve already bloodied
our doors. I still don’t want to dine with you.
The bees have given up on honey

and deal only in saltwater now.
They pour and we drink to keep
from overflowing, the others are watching,
and have turned to wine,

we’ve all turned. The queen is drunk.
I am drunk. Elijah is drunk. The children
are drunk. You, especially, are drunk. You may go.
We are cleaning out our houses.

Sonja Vitow is a high school French and Spanish teacher in Boston, MA, where she coedits a small literary magazine called The Knicknackery. Some of her work has appeared in Rattle, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, Carve Magazine, Gulf Coast, NANO Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her short story “Pillars of Hercules” won second place in Zoetrope: All-Story’s 2013 Short Fiction Competition. Another was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s May 2013 Short Story Award for New Writers. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize as well as first place in the 2013 Emerson College Graduate Poetry Awards.