A Bee Lands a Yellow Violet Sags

by Christopher Citro

Are we eating fire? The fire knows.
~Christopher Kennedy, “Five Fictions”

Peak, trough, peak, peak, trough. Repeat. You feel you could live in one of those houses, that one with pointed roof and buttercup trim, standing among actual mountains, green valleys everywhere mountains aren’t. All you have left is: your car in a supermarket lot, cooler ice melting against provolone slices in cellophane, these pale blossoms upon the fields little wolves with honey fur. Clouds herd shadows over houses. The wolves switch off and on.

Christopher Citro is the author of the poetry books: If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015), as well as the collaboratively written poetry chapbooks: I Wear a Top Hat When I Go Into the Forest (Ghost City Press, 2025) and The Box We Put the World in to Keep a Corner From Shattering (Aureole Press, 2025). His awards include a Pushcart Prize for poetry, and his poems appear in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and West Branch. His prose poetry has been anthologized in They Said: An Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016). His short-form fiction appears in The Spectacle, The Cincinnati Review, and Best Microfiction 2020. Christopher is an editorial assistant for Seneca Review and lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.