Poetry by Cicely Williams
Art by Ivy Tang
If you tell me why you always ring the Hornet hive doorbell
and wait with a spoon thinking it’s a honey hive, thinking
the amber inhabitants will remind you to wipe your feet on the welcome
mat before letting you swallow and scoop honey soup and larvae lava,
I’ll tell you why I stood Swan-Lake-point-toed
on the dining room chair and took down the disco ball and dipped
it in a milk bowl and swallowed it whole
If you tell me why you bend the sharp barbs of blackthorn
bushes into holiday bows while distracted on picnics
And why in grass-stained gingham you envy the pea green caterpillar
crawling around your wrist, ticklish bracelet of bliss,
I’ll tell you why I blot my lipstick on each and every lottery ticket
and why I imagine that my go-to shade’s name “Ruby Adore”
is the stage name of a showgirl with a perpetual hangnail who inhales
hot Belmonts backstage, dews up her skin with glycerin, pickpockets
her admirers’ diamonds and hides them between each of her ribs
If you tell me why you bottle sunrays to uncork them at midnight and sniff
the cinder and wax bone cologne of Helios
and why you don’t use the word “lush” enough for someone
who has soaked in moss baths in April and who whined
that there wasn’t enough foxglove in eden,
and why you beat your shadow for her bad posture
and why you cried, not when the primrose wilted
but when the Calico scratched her trachea
on the rickety table and its vase teetered and smashed
with the clatter of a glass deluge on hardwood,
I’ll tell you why I dove to grab at its shards with my naked
hands even though the broom was closeted right next to the cataclysm
And why I did not flinch when a small mangled fragment,
a mouse’s mirror, martyred my fingertip.