Frogs and Bees

Frogs and Bees


When I see a jar of tomato sauce, I smell Mummy’s garden
where we trapped
bees in our glass canisters with holes punched into the lids
so they wouldn’t
suffocate like us in the house that summer we behaved
like imps in church
so Mummy made us do jigsaw puzzles of oars and penguins.
So we ambushed
the bees, armed with our glass rotundas, faces ripped off,
hollows drained
of pulpy tomato innards now oozing from the garbage bag
in the kitchen
where Mummy churned the mango ice-cream Port of Spain
craved like crack
rock. Oh how we wished to entrap the fireflies romancing
night
with their candlelight torsos—fat chance, especially after
that day,
after the sharp exclamation of our natural names cut
through us
like a discordant cow-bell, after we tried to re-enter back
door incognito
even though she awaited us at its threshold like Charon
at the lip of death,
brandishing the wounded trash bag dripping tomato pain
onto linoleum.
Tell me you wouldn’t rather be blinded by a frog too, than
to see the look
on my mother’s face that day. Because it’s been said that
the frogs in Trinidad
can forever blind you with their flying venom, and I am still
afraid of frogs.



© Samantha Thornhill

Published in Louisville Review