Jamie Manias
Firsts
Through a thin cloud (not so much
floating like a veil as sliming like a membrane),
the gray October sun scattered its light dismissively
in photons chill as glass pebbles. Some struck
my cool blue can, sweating down to the thirsty asphalt
incensed by pickup fumes and chapped by so many shoes at once.
Eighteen, I sipped my first-ever beer,
my first-ever crime at my first-ever tailgate;
I hovered near my unremarkable first ex—
freshly dumped and so young I’d already settled
on the colors of our wedding: gold and blue,
same as the university where we first met
two weeks ago. I furrowed my brow,
hoping the beer would make my face
so brittle and legible that my store-brand love
might crack through my pores and blind him.
But I found no more of myself at the bottom of the Bud,
it only stung me like the apple cider vinegar panacea
which, after so many of my mother’s prescriptions,
had come to taste like disease. Nothing here could make me
anything. The wheat potion had all of rabies’ backwash
and none of its passion.
The sky ruptured - - the sun cracked
down my stupid head, its yolk ran thick and warm
in my hair, into my ear suggesting disillusion makes
a clean slate for a more vivid delirium.