The Wrong Teacup (Alice, Annotated #1)

They are already calling
no room, no room
down the white length of the table,
though chairs sit open
all around the teapot.

I have always entered rooms
as though there might be rules for them,
some hidden order in the saucers,
some riddle everyone else knew better
than to answer sincerely.

When I make a joke, it often falls
between the cups untouched.
When I tell the truth, I tell it plain,
without the sugar cube, the lemon slice,
and people stare as if candor were a breach of etiquette.

My mother taught me please
and thank you like gloves for good china.
I put them on everywhere.
Still, people look at me strangely,
as if manners are only manners when worn lightly.

And if someone asks me about books,
or any bright subject I love,
I spill toward it gladly,
all spine and paper, character and sentence,
until I see their faces closing like little doors.

By then the table has split itself
into six conversations at once,
the Hatter laughing into one sleeve,
the Hare interrupting from somewhere to my left,
people changing seats before I can find my place in it.

I wait for the opening. Miss it.
Wait again. Miss it worse.
A spoon strikes porcelain hard enough to live in my teeth.
The tea goes cold. My hands do not.
I cannot tell whether I am shivering or ringing.

At some point I go quiet as the dormouse,
small and half-lost in the noise,
listening from the middle of it
as if being quiet enough might pass
for belonging.

Alice changed sizes for a room like this.
I do it without the bottle.
Too blunt, too eager, too quiet, too much,
never once the proper shape
for their curated little chaos.

By the end even the lamplight hurts.
The watch on the table ticks straight through me.
Everything gleams too brightly to bear.
And still that childish, merciless chorus:
no room, no room, no room

As if there had not been chairs.
As if there were not enough tea.
As if I were not standing there at all,
holding the wrong teacup in both hands,
trying not to let them see it shake.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Wrong Teacup is the first poem in Alice, Annotated, a series born from my lifelong love of Alice in Wonderland and the endless symbolic room it provides. I rarely write anything by accident, and I am happiest when a piece can hold more than one meaning at once, when it can hide a second pulse beneath the first. I have found myself circling Alice for a while. What began as an image became a framework.

This piece feels too personal to leave unexplained. It is about living inside a neurodivergent mind, about the strain of trying to decipher rooms that seem to come with rules everyone else received in advance. I was not diagnosed or treated until age 33, despite showing signs throughout childhood, all the way up to being expelled from private school at age 12 for behaviors no one thought to understand with compassion. I eventually learned how to advocate for myself through years of caring for vulnerable people as a nurse, and that advocacy changed the way I understood my own life.

I wrote this poem for anyone who has ever felt misplaced in a room that claimed to have no reason to exclude them. If you are somewhere on the spectrum, I hope it reminds you that you are not alone, that your mind is not wrong for being differently made, and that there is a place for you here.