Two Fine Words Like Cherry Preserve
My name is printed in a column,
Politely, like a queue,
A school crocodile line.
Two words in staining ink.
My fingertips,
They have turned black,
Tracing lines of a curling print,
Prints burned away by fire,
Off a silent roasting child,
Fat, bean-ish, and blonde.
I saw the advent of my article,
My little contribution,
Beside the colossus of stocks,
My two fine words,
Dwarfed by the daily book,
Like my baby’s booties set by daddy’s wellies.
But my world was not so humongous always,
I lived in a little room,
Lots of little rooms, a womb,
Capsules in a hive,
A hive of crazies, crazy wasps,
That sting and live to sting again.
But like a bee, to live my fullest was to die,
Split in half, chopped wood,
Splintered and tearing.
Daddy found me,
Split as a spent bee,
Leaking juicy goo,
Cherry preserve from either wrist.
He could have put me on toast,
Eaten me up, a tasty little smackerel.
But he didn’t.
He carried me away,
To the asylum of the expired.
In a cell again,
Padded just like last time,
But smaller,
So small I cannot kick or bite,
My cell is hugging me.
I am not as tasty as I was.
I am a fermented wine:
The cherries went sour, you see,
Sour like my milk.
But I am back to my hive,
This matrix of stretched out hexagons.
So come and find me!
We can play sardines,
Hide under here with me—
You can have your own hugging hexagon.
Copyright ©
Alice Reynolds
|