Cicely Grace (she/her) was a finalist for the 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Prism International, Yolk Literary, CV2, Pulp Literature, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MA degree in English Literature at UBC and lives on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations (Vancouver).
“‘Garden Party’ makes reference to Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Young,’ published in her 1962 collection, All My Pretty Ones. In particular, it draws inspiration from the poem’s last three lines.”
After “Young” by Anne Sexton
“[I] thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.”
The summer the a/c broke at the bar
I waitressed like a dizzy bird
would waitress and escaped
often to the alley of piss and small
reprieve to rummage in my purse
for my smokes and my child’s
image of august as the large
and charming host of that garden
party in which I lay long ago
in a sleeping bag beside my sister
and beside six or twenty sweet-pitched crickets
and below the black-robed bats
and within the mosquito storm
that bit again and again my sister’s
cheeks but didn’t like me, my blood
too thin or too sour or too green,
and below the stars who leaned down
with their gossip and advice, incantations,
those white-eyed socialites turning about
their dark party, and I in my skin
that was warm and unassailed
pretended I was up there
waltzing with them in a gown
of fireflies or sparkling steam,
kisses, perfume, champagne, sweet dreams.
