Corpse Reviver

Once a childhood friend of mine swallowed a cup of crushed glass. Her mother had poured crushed ice and Dr. Pepper into her glass-lined thermos which had broken and the glass had comingled with the ice. Nothing seemed strange until she felt her insides getting cut.

For a short time this incident gave her a certain mystique, the way trauma imparts an aura to the one involved. She had to spend an entire night in the hospital! But eventually we all went back to our lives and the dramas involved, the fear we felt over all that was happening to us and around us at Robert E. Lee Middle School (if there is a hell on earth, it's middle school, particularly one named after a losing general). Years later, we looked back at the crushed glass incident and laughed because things had turned so much more serious -- drinking and drugs, abortions and accidents of the lethal sort, love and all its attendant horrors. It was enough to make drinking a glass of something that could cut you from top to bottom seem innocent.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you./ You leave the same impression/ Of something beautiful, but annihilating." Sylvia Plath

A Dirty Mirror

2 ozs. whiskey
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon grenadine
1 slice of lemon

Serve over crushed ice


Benedictions and Maledictions

First published in Oberon

Advent
How long until you don’t send a birthday card,
until you forget the date and think some time
in December, that month of such sweet
sadness that whispers to us of years past,
of hurried celebrations, the X in Christmas
when you’ve grown weary of spelling it out.
After all the presents have been revealed, what next?
You have been gone longer than you were around
and nothing changes, still the new year stretches
out like a question nobody wants to answer, all
champagne and streamers, the cheap party favors
that ruin easily and have to be cleaned up
the next morning, ordinary time slinking in,
making us wish for something to wish for again.