I hold the vacant cradles in my palm:wax wan-white, honey-drained, ringedwith dirt and gray. I arrange the shellsatop the coffee table’s grain: an atlasof foreclosure left to empty on the branch.I think about catastrophe more than poetry.The colony that fled my neighbor’s keepleaving behind the flightless broodand then expiring in the field. The shoddy roomin Lincoln where my mother died, strung out,with a bullet in her head. No one wantsa place like that but me: yellow-stainedwith nicotine, waxy blinds pulled downagainst the cracking glass. In the archiveof images on Google Maps I watchits slow decay. Walls left to bendand bleach, the front lot overgrownwith weeds where now the feral beesmust love to swarm, rattling the tickseed,buzzing in the bluestem grass, buildingsticky hives behind the rotting boards.