I go to tell my girlfriend I love her and the words become a flood of bees. I come home to hit my father up for money and I turn to tell him I love him but the walls become bees. We bury Shawn and the dirt poured onto his grave becomes bees. We bury Trenton and I try to walk up to see his body in the casket dressed in a suit he would never wear, but the casket becomes bees. Derrick dies and his mother cries when she hears the news, each of her tears becoming a hive of bees. The churches where I ask forgiveness for all of my misdeeds become bees once my prayers enter them, and so I am never forgiven. The bees won’t leave my apartment. I can’t afford to fix the muffler in my shitty car, and so every song I play in the shitty car stereo system is backed by a low buzz. I kiss a girl at a party and we pull long strands of honey from our tongues. I drive to some vague western landscape and the sand is littered with dead bees. My pal Brittany tells me a story about how bees don’t want to sting people. They don’t want to die, she tells me. They want to live as much as we do. And I think of all of the friends I’ve loved who didn’t want to live at all, and how I never told them I loved them enough when they were alive. How they chased something worth stinging until they finally found it.

— Hanif Abdurraqib, from “On the Performance of Softness,” in A Little Devil in America