Featured Poem

Colored Glass Bottles  

(First published in The Knight's Library Magazine March 31, 2021)

Colored water in glass bottles  

on the kitchen windowsill. 

You sought food coloring,  

carefully selected bottles, 

placed them on the trailer windowsill.  

Squeezing drops 

until the standing collective mimicked a fluid suncatcher. 

 I hope they made you smile, which didn’t happen often,  

I am told.  Your smile. 

Smiles came from bottles filled with pills, liquor bottles,  

bottles, bottles, bottles.  

Not from clear glass bottles filled with food coloring on the windowsill. 

They made me smile when the sunlight splayed 

primary kaleidoscopes on the linoleum floor.

Once you were gone, the bottles on the windowsill vacated.  

Those weren’t your only bottles.   

While the gold-plated “Barbara” became smoke-tarnished  

on the urn in the next room, I grasped the cologne-filled fawn from the medicine cabinet.  

Pa told me to not touch it, but I did anyway.   

I took it off the shelf. 

I gazed at it, I made it talk, and frolic across the bathroom sink 

while he watched C-SPAN.   

I thought about drinking its innocent scent,  

sucking that little fawn dry,  

but saved that endeavor for home.   

I swilled the amber liquid from the perfume bottle  

on my Mother’s nightstand,  

that sat on the mirrored oval tray.   

It resembled a tiny brandy snifter.  

I knew from watching Bogart and Bacall.   

My Mother called Poison Control once the fragrance wafted from my lips.  

They said to “wait and see” what happened to me.   

Guess we found out, 

as the ice cubes – clink, clink, clink – in my glass.