Cherry Smyth
Each Tidy Reverse
Dozy bees bumped at the warm windows.
We tried not to flirt, had said it was over.
You held a hair from your dog to my blind face
like a pin. Each time I detected the prick,
you praised my delicacy, embedded
your green pea beneath my layers of no.
It was adultery that was not. Uncurtained,
invisible, our low drones sealed, you tested
your private syllabus on quiet streets,
slipping loose of the steering wheel, lying
over the handbrake, the gear-stick between us
transmitting lust through used air. I grew into
your queen, glass screened with breath, we honeyed
in your car, a hair’s breadth from discovery.
Cherry Smyth’s debut poetry collection was When the Lights Go Up (Lagan Press 2001). A pamphlet, The Future of Something Delicate was published by Smith/ Doorstop, 2005 and a second collection is forthcoming. She teaches poetry in prisons, Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and at Greenwich University.
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