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Poem: ‘The Bachelor, Season 92 Million’

Science in meter and verse

Illustration showing the overhead view of a bee in flight over a field of flowers by Masha Foya.

Masha Foya

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From the choice   of ten thousand
candidates  how does the bee
  know which is its flower?
Purple
coneflower shudders,
   coreopsis unfurls
its recursive
light-licking spirals ...

Yet here, a knuckle
of fuzz
    drops
to the edge
of a sunflower’s

fleece—
and moves
back and forth, like the hand


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of a blind man,
searching

and searching

its face

Jessica Nordell, a writer and poet with a background in physics, is author of The End of Bias: A Beginning (Metropolitan Books, 2021). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Best New Poets and Copper Nickel. Her debut poetry manuscript, Your Singing Is How We Will Find You, was a finalist for the 2026 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Nordell lives in Minneapolis, where she plays drums in a dad rock cover band.

More by Jessica Nordell
Scientific American Magazine Vol 335 Issue 2This article was published with the title “The Bachelor, Season 92 Million” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 335 No. 2 (), p. 87
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican092026-2EtnPpenaY392R5JsybGlU

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