Tag Archives: wine

Lindsay McLeod, ‘Last Call’

Leave a reply

If this isn’t what you’ve yearned for
or indeed what you are craving
then cup your hands, drink deeply
of a sweeter misbehaving.

If you cannot find your wine inside
the glass that you were given,
taste the new with eyes and thighs
and dye your lips a deep vermillion

with a juice that has been pressed
from vines let grow out of control
that taste of summertime and
sex and drugs and rock and roll

because if you…

find distaste in your final breath
dressed in another’s ill fit clothes
remember, this did not just happen
sweetheart, this is what you chose.

*****

Lindsay McLeod is an Australian poet that has won a few things and is widely published. He just had to start messing about with words again lately. You’d think he’d know better by now, but oh no. Some of his most recent work can be found in DILLYDOUN REVIEW, GRAND LIL THINGS, DRAWN TO THE LIGHT, POETiCA and MORTAL MAGAZINE.

RHL: In addition to Mr McLeod’s self-description, let me add that I have been trying and failing to contact him. I don’t even have permission to post this poem. If anyone can put me in touch with him, I would be grateful.

Photo: “98/365: ♫ Red, Red Wine…” by rogersmj is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Jane Blanchard, “Transactions”

2 Replies

Erice, Jane Blanchard

Erice, Sicily

Transactions (in Sicilia)

The merchant was polite as I came in
on Monday afternoon to browse for wine,
but conversation happened only when
we spoke the common language of the vine.

A dozen bottles were selected, then
examined, labels studied, line by line,
at last set back into the proper bin,
except for one most likely to taste fine.

It did, so I returned to that same store
throughout the week and found the bill to be
a little less each time. I said no more
than grazie, smiling ever pleasantly.

By Saturday, I had a patron’s status,
awarding me a bar of chocolate gratis.

Jane Blanchard writes: “Transactions, first published in The Tau (2017), appears in my latest collection, In or Out of Season (2020). I am inordinately fond of reading and writing sonnets, perhaps because I studied so many of them while in graduate school. This particular sonnet is anecdotal; its speaker is my husband Jimmy, who accompanied me to Bread Loaf in Sicily in 2013 and wandered around Erice while I was in a workshop led by Stanley Plumly. Currently, it is hard not to feel nostalgic about such experiences.”

A native Virginian, Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia, USA. She has earned degrees from Wake Forest and Rutgers Universities. Her collections to date have been published by Kelsay Books.