Stephen Brown’s “Edgewater” has been paired with a vibrant canary yellow-dyed denim outfit from Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons' Spring/Summer 2027 menswear show. The slim yellow silhouette combined with the concluding song choice ("The Lonely Shepherd") feels like a direct homage to the iconic yellow-and-black striped jumpsuit worn by Bruce Lee in Game of Death (1978) and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). In "Edgewater," Bruce Lee movies "take the household by storm" and once the famed martial artist is mentioned, readers will notice a direct parallel between the aggressive boys and the wasps "sprawled out in tight military formation."
— Paul Cunningham, Editor
Edgewater
Wasps sprawled out in tight military formation over the swimming pool. It was 1993, and hot enough outside to forget the school year was still in session. We remained underwater long enough for its surface to still. Through the thin liquid membrane, I imagine remembering to watch buzzing bodily proportions distort. Heads and eyes warped cartoonishly large, searching, while sleek abdomens shrink into magical floating black fairy dots.
"How long can you hold your breath?" Billy had asked above the stompy, clip-clop of our middle-most brother, Jerry, joining us from across the great green lawn. Billy's voice recently began to crack, a fact which only the adults in our life were eager to remark upon. The craterous landscape of his acne, however, began to burgeon months prior, and that was an object of easy ridicule for the rest of us kids.
Paper wasps don't cover their nests. They build out their exposed wafer-thin combs in defensible locations—beneath the lip of an above ground pool, for example.
"An hour," I announced confidently. Chlorinated pool water sputtered out over my bottom lip as I kicked to keep my chin from sinking. I imagine remembering my wet childish coughing, and my splayed hands splashing on either side to keep me afloat.
Wasps are aggressively competitive, even when it comes to one another. Unlike other, similar insects, their colonies are not established with a clear leader. Instead, there are often several just-as-likely candidates, any of whom might vie for dominance over their family. Brutal battles break out within a colony while social structure need be formed, or reinforced.
"Good man." That year, Bruce Lee movies had taken the household by storm. My older brothers took to imitating Bruce's sly, sidelong look. It almost always indicated attack was imminent. The heels of Billy's hands pressed temporary indentations into the sides of our deflating red utility ball. We'd been tossing it back and forth with gradually escalating difficulty. It was the kind of ball someone would have had to steal from gym class, before I'd ever been old enough to attend a gym class. Readying himself, Billy made one last hard throw into the wasps' delicate, unsuspecting home, before he disappeared in a gurgle of water.
I didn't yet comprehend what it meant for our brother to be allergic to bees, or the game of social hierarchies boys and would-be young men learn to play, in which Billy was now too big to retaliate against, and—as I would soon enough learn—I wasn't.
Stephen Brown is a Pushcart nominated writer-activist with a Philly attitude and a background in LGBT+ studies and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. He is the author of two multi-genre chapbooks, A Portrait of Brotherhood as Two Boys from Space (2025) and His Boyfriend Materials (2024). Find him on Bsky or IG: @scarletwitchy
