~
“What if the moon was essence of quinine”
—Frank Stanford
and spilled cinchona bitter-bright across our nights, berried
with juniper? Tinctures of quinine [gin-iced, lime-stung]
a father’s daily ritual; nighttime’s lingering antidote tingeing
daytime with citrine light. Biting moondazzle lending
its medicament eye to every tryst. Sure, beneath cherry trees
the dewy girls in their sweetheart dresses still tip cheeks
to suitors, but this is no Capraesque idyll. Here everything is
pallid, palled, romance given way to austerity’s anodyne.
A world rinsed in astringent luster where children in summer-
dusked ring-a-rosies no longer swing through clouds
of insecticide; darkening lawns [acrid-fogged] pale & dreamy
with poison now only filled with lunarlight & the patter
of mosquitoes dropping like rain. A moon that scrapes clean, debrides
every plump pink, rose & plum, to reveal faultless pith;
[moon as trocar; moon as silver-nitrate-cautery, moon as scalpel]
baring sterile bone. A celestial body to bathe late workweek dinners,
[sleepy kids seated at the table] [Roberta Flack on the Hi-Fi]
& the ghosts of pipe tobacco in disinfectant, blanching
all those mid-century scenes. Father’s hands slipping ice
from silver martini shakers into cut crystal, one long finger stirs
the lime slice in its sluice of tonicked gin. Aproned Mother,
highbreasted, cleancheeked spooning ersatz chop suey
onto greenstamp plates; that precise choreography. That wedded
hit & miss. High wheeze and hiss of flawed kiddie lungs,
[snowfield x-rays looming] counterpoint to Cronkite & cutlery-clink.
If everything were pre-dosed with antidote, [moon as vulnerary
votive] if we were nightly baptised in tincture of gentian,
our quotidian quinine, then we [sure paler, sure brittle; sure everything
pulled gantrywise & thin as lithographic film] wouldn’t
need to unroot occupiers [malarial, melanoma, metastasized
blastomas]. Then, even childhood’s lost tinfoil days & nicotined
nights could finally breathe easier.
~
Kim Welliver lives in Utah. Her work has won awards, including first place for her collection of poems Thriving. She has been published in print and online publications, including Rock & Sling, Mid-American Review, Night Picnic, Sidereal, Healing Muse, Corvid Queen, Progenitor, Palette, Duende, Fairy Tale Review Ochre Anthology, and others.