Yellow Jackets

Here come my boys, their mouths ripped open,
a labor tears from their tongues.
Each son bears a cargo of yellow jackets laced to his sleeves,
his throat, one with a third eye, hinged and angry.
In the bathroom, I strip and douse them,
rinse their screams. And now I fight alone
spraying Lysol to wet wings, swinging rags and brushes,
dodging, stabbing at every flighted thing. The hill of black
and yellow death swells, one monument to a mother’s power.