Wine with Everything Was What I Said
       

when someone would ask me
for the color of my lipstick.
I loved the way it made me feel
like a mad queen issuing a proclamation—

Wine with Everything and enough
roasted squab for all the rowdy villagers.
A festival of plums & harlequin roses—
that color, I mean, the way it never bled
in betrayal across my teeth. Amative—

(disposed to love), the gist of a shade
too kitten-heeled and pearly for me,
a shimmer lifted away by the wind
while riding on the back of an older boy's
motorcycle when you were supposed to
be home babysitting your younger brother.

Mars Rising, a chroma too atmospheric
not to leave what looked like a trail of blood
across throats and earlobes, and let me just say
Desire Was a Blue-Eyed Man, silky & humid,
a taste that really left me wanting
to be kissed down there by the river
before I learned Crush was a color
that meant avalanche, matte and opaque,

too heavy for a girl revved up on Revlon,
a girl too impractical to sustain
the momentum of anything but dancing,
who thought there was nothing more
hypnotic than moonlight darkening the hollows
of a man's cheekbones. I tried them all—

by that I mean the lipstick shades, of course—
the orchids and the mochas and the corals,
the lacquered, the frosted,
the ticklish feather coats of glossy nudes,
the amber-golds and apricots— all
imprints ghosting on goblets raised
in the palette cleansing light
between him and him and him.
Wine with Everything clinging to the rim.

Tweet
Copyright © 2021 Laura Sobbott Ross All rights reserved
from Kestrel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission