“It’s Always Tea-Time,” digital illustration by Maggie Taylor, 2007

Here, it is always tea-time, and the tea
is always fresh. Here, a dormouse
dozing on your shoulder goes unnoticed
almost, your eyes listless and lifted
toward a sky consumed by creeping twilight.
You look the middle child in this scene,
smaller than the expanse of the Hatter’s broad shoulders,
which reach, ravenous, across the foreground.
And yet you seem a shoulder versed
in resting heads, meticulous, and measuring the time.
In two minutes, long or short,
You will wake the dormouse,
brace him at the elbow’s crook, confess to the Hatter,
We should all, I think, say what we really mean.