Nick Conrad

PAPER WASP NEST

I should have burned

their paper hive,

doused it with gas

and lit the match.

Since May, they had

lurked amid the branches

of a bush by our

front door. I did not

find them out until

late July, or,

rather, a swarm

of them found me.

In the days after

the first frost, their nest seemed

like some grenade lobbed

into the future.

I clipped it loose,

placed it, as best

I could, in a shrub

out back, knowing next

spring its denizens

would stumble dazed

into a halting kind

of flight that all

too soon would turn

into a rage

for a different

kind of order.

Nick Conrad's poems have appeared in national and international journals, most recently Badlands, Blast Furnace, Borderlands, Cortland Review, Dos Passos Review, Freshwater, Hawaii Pacific Review, Kentucky Review, Red Savina, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Stoneboat, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Orbis, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. His work is forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review and Wilderness House Literary Review.