Ink

Real men take their drinks neat

my father would say
to be able to withstand the bite
of alcohol and survive
the next morning
by drinking
the hair off its skinned pelt
was the recipe for a man –
some drunken evolution
of snakes and snails and
other rhymes
we were forced to swallow
on playgrounds and classrooms
at and outside of schools
some of us never left.

Relaxation required justification –
a price to be paid
for forgetting the workday pains
by imbibing some self-
indulgence in nearby booths of bars
where customers fear to tread.

Those pitstops became islands,
vacation homes,
secret resentment repositories,
depots where comrades traded tirades
that filled empty bottles
supposedly to the brim
to prevent an outpouring
at home.

But some men are smaller
than bottles,
and in drinking to forget
forget in venting
the direction of vomit,
how easy it is to drown
others with its corrosive acidity.

Flights, Issue Fourteen, November 2024