Bald-faced Hornet · Kendall Lake

May we be more honest about what we are

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by KJ Ceranowski

[The bald-faced hornet is not actually a hornet. It is a yellowjacket wasp
that, unlike its tawny cousins, lacks yellow pigmentation. It is instead dressed in white stripes and splotches—piebald, bald-faced, as in a ghostly (ghastly?) white visage.]

We call them so many things they are not: hornet, aggressive, bull wasp
as if brutish, as if their sting is a random offensive, an attack
for lack of anything better or a lashing out with undue cause,
unwarranted and reckless

I know too well how easily a defensive needle is mistaken for
aggression. I have been taken for the same—vengeful, unable
to let it go or forgive without calamity

Scientists believe wasps can remember faces in their particularity
each curve, crevice, angle of jaw and squint of eye—this wasp will
single out an invader whose face cannot be forgotten, attacking only
the one in a crowd

Perhaps there is a lesson here in letting go…

But who else will save us when we might have died but didn’t? Who else
will counter the invasion, take the sting out of the wound?

In the face of the ghost: threat, a bite to ease the pain of another pain—
when they call you a monster, do not forget
every smile is full of teeth

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