It Tastes Like Pain

and true nothings

Friday, a single yellow jacket tested my patience. She hovered, too close to my ear, and even followed me onto the train as I headed home from work. I moved to another carriage to get away from her. I wasn’t frightened, but aware of the inescapable irony had she decided to sting me for some reason.

Is that technically irony? Either way, I would read something into it. If my mother’s spirit knew I had personified her as various wasp species, she would seek me out to sting. My grandmother, on the other hand, would be puzzled and annoyed, “I never understand anything you say, but it’s always nice to hear from you.”

But she always knew more than she let on. Not understanding was sometimes plausible deniability. “Plausible deniability” is a term she wouldn’t be interested in understanding, and sometimes I get it. I see the arrogance of believing you can have a meta-perspective on human behavior, much less give it names, tease out subconscious motives. Believe you’ve got it all figured out. Maybe it wasn’t that she was glad to see me go, but she was comfortable with the distance.

I read that yellow jackets only travel 1000 meters from their nest. So even if the wasp made it out the doors at the next stop, she’s now on her own. She’ll live there, along the creek where I run, eating aphids for another couple of weeks, maybe. And that’ll be that. The end of the line, with no poems left on the petals of the rosebuds.

A woman walks from the path through her garden and sees the yellow jacket and makes a mental note to buy lavender the next time goes to the nursery. What’s inhospitable for one species, soothes another. No need for drama.

---

Maybe I relate to wasps because I saw an exhibition at the museum with all the social wasps singled out under glass bell jars, each hovering over the earth on the blunt end of a stainless steel pin.

Sometimes I can’t eat at restaurants or other people’s houses because I can taste the metal of the fork’s tines, or of the edge of the spoon’s bowl when it’s rough from use. I always have to push away the thought that it’s some kind of hex.

It tastes like pain.

If I were to paint pain, it’d be a metallic silver. Like mercury. The astata species of wasps are sometimes silver. The males, at any rate.

I have no idea if this is some kind of synesthesia. Transference. Free association.

But this is a true thing in my life. Sometimes I think the truest things in my life are the experiences that strip down to nothings. I think that’s why I’m drawn to poetry. Its witches’ work: lashing the elements of the world together to create meaning—and motion. I don’t know if belief can move a mountain, but belief in a mountain can move an entire community.

Maybe belief can resurrect the dead in pieces and in portraits such that no one can dispute, defend, or deconstruct them. You can’t deconstruct an alignment of memories. You can only shuffle them around. Like the gems in a kaleidoscope.

---

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’ll be back later this week with an audio poem. And again on Sunday with another Process Journal Entry.

Until then, have a great week!

Warmly,

Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.