Love comes tapping at the waxy walls, scratching at the hexagon cells, reminding me once again of a life of unlikely transformations. I wasn’t always a bee, and it wasn’t a Kafkaesque metamorphosis—just a stinger here, a compound eye there, and a tarsus claw to run through my untidy stubble in the bathroom mirror. Where once were voices, now there’s buzz, though I can’t recall when one became the other: and where once was a lonely bedsit and a doorbell that never rang, now there is hive and the intimacy of swarm. And just as I never expected a life of Queen and abundant flowers, I never imagined love like this—urgent and tactile, honeyed like Sun.

Oz Hardwick

is a European poet, photographer, and wannabe musician, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “maybe 15?” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). He has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in disreputable bars. In 2022, he was awarded the Arc Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.”

With Anne Caldwell, Oz edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022); and with Cassandra Atherton, he edited Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (Cheshire, MA: MadHat Press, 2024).

Author’s website: https://ozhardwick.co.uk

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Lindisfarne Conundrum, cheribun by Oz Hardwick in Issue 33 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2026); Second Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4

⚡ Adventures in Experiential Limnology, cheribun by Oz Hardwick in Issue 29 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2025); First Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3

⚡ The Irresistible Rise of Prose Poetry: Northern Soul Talks to Poet Oz Hardwick, interview by Mark Connors in Northern Soul (9 December 2024)

⚡ A New Home Beneath the Stars, prose poem in Flash Glass (1 May 2024)

⚡ Oz Hardwick, seven prose poems in The Mackinaw (Issue 1, January 2024)

⚡ Three Poems by Oz Hardwick in Anthropocene (3 August 2022): “Jobs for All”; “The Seaside Line”; and “Absolute Zero”

⚡ Five Stunning Prose Poems by Oz Hardwick in Lothlorian Poetry Journal (23 April 2021): “The Glasnost Legacy”; “Diluvial”; “The Evolutionary Urge”; “Yolo”; and “Heredity”