Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Sculpting the Girl with a Bee Dress ※
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman
–Simone de Beauvoir
Before her nipples blush
into stone buds,
he casts bees in wax
so her eyes are abuzz
with wings in flight,
her larval tongue
steaming pink and red.
Next, he hems her ovaries
into honeycombs,
graces her hands into
a hymn of flowers,
pins her forehead
inside a halo of sky.
He’d let her slumber
in honey and song
expecting no battle cry
in B sharp, nor the frenzy
of the swarm, the insect fury
that might kill him.
※ Inspired by Maggie Taylor’s Girl with a Bee Dress
Abigail Ardelle Zammit is from the island of Malta. She is a senior lecturer in English language and literature and has had poetry published in a variety of British and American journals. Abigail’s two collections of poetry are Voices from the Land of Trees (Smokestack, 2007), and Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (SPM, 2015), which won second prize in the Sentinel Poetry Book Competition. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing (Lancaster), and is currently working on a collection of poems exploring the connections between place, text, body, and the female experience.