“Hoosiers turned out in large numbers to celebrate their newly lawful right to buy alcohol on Sundays.” –Indianapolis Star
All day things seemed half-made: brittle, watery sunlight, raw crackle of the mixtape on the stereo, our faces in the mirror over the mantle. When we started to fray around the edges we got Sunday-drunk off rent-controlled Manhattans, mixed from what was on hand. We pulled juice glasses from the cabinet, cooled hard city water to harder ice, traded a box of red wine to the neighbors for their front porch bourbon. There was a run on the drugstore and we dove in, came out with a few bruises and a bottle of cheap vermouth. We turned out our pockets to buy organic cherries from the only grocery store for miles.
It’s the type of drink you could swirl on a fire escape, twelve stories up. The type that’s a prop in an argument: gesture with the glass, sip through the silence. The domestic soaked in liquor—sting under sweetness, like the cherry at the bottom.
All day things seemed half-made: brittle, watery sunlight, raw crackle of the mixtape on the stereo, our faces in the mirror over the mantle. When we started to fray around the edges we got Sunday-drunk off rent-controlled Manhattans, mixed from what was on hand. We pulled juice glasses from the cabinet, cooled hard city water to harder ice, traded a box of red wine to the neighbors for their front porch bourbon. There was a run on the drugstore and we dove in, came out with a few bruises and a bottle of cheap vermouth. We turned out our pockets to buy organic cherries from the only grocery store for miles.
It’s the type of drink you could swirl on a fire escape, twelve stories up. The type that’s a prop in an argument: gesture with the glass, sip through the silence. The domestic soaked in liquor—sting under sweetness, like the cherry at the bottom.
Frances Klein is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She has been published in So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Vonnegut Memorial Library and Tupelo Press, among others. Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review. Readers can find more of her work at kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com.