They still recall with dread the salt pillars of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In a way, before their inaugural show, they too felt
like salt pillars, immobilized with nerves in the wings.
They’re old hands now at getting ready in tiny dressing rooms,
their halos compensating for burned out lights
to illuminate fastidious swipes of brushes and fingers.
Beeswax lipsticks, kohl, mascara, rouged knees and nipples—
humans are known to refine the blessings of angels.
Cosmetics have come a long way since the fallen Watchers
smuggled to their paramours the gift of decoration.

The two baby-queer angels aren’t interested in human lovers,
not when they have each other and a case full of makeup,
an empty stage draped in velvet or back alleys
smelling sharp like petrichor and bourbon after dark.
So eager they are that sometimes their red mouths grow redder
with blood. Sometimes they have to take a concealer sponge
to their blue-bitten necks afterward. They revel in the bruises
adorning their human corporations better than any piece of jewelry,
marking each other as taken, as beloved.
Their pigment-sticky kisses invent more colors
than the human eye can see,
than there ever were in the sterile-white halls of heaven.

They know they will be punished if they’re caught,
strappadoed by their wings until they pop out of their sockets;
ulnae and radii smashed, blood feathers torn out;
cheeks wet: holy water dacryphilia.
But tonight there is ambrosiac lethe to be found amid the first jazz riffs,
their cue to strut onstage in their tightest corsets and highest heels
like the burlesque flapper angels they were created to be.
They have a show to put on, a duet to perform.
It won’t feel like a celestial harmony or divine ecstasy,
but like something so much better.