Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

I was so insanely good at drinking

that it worried me. The gold opals that shot through my veins. The way the air became a purple beaded curtain whose refraction I was forever entering, gloved hands thrown up bashfully like Marilyn Monroe. Dressing myself in quips as elaborate as the embroidered smoke in an opium den. My soft-shoe never sticking to my shadow.

And not once slurred sex or vomit or catastrophic fall. Until I topped ten drinks and suffered the only hangover of my life watching the fleshy cinematography of Harold & Maude, the metaphysical dread palpable as the smell of a black dog in the bed with me, its morbid emanations all through my bones, like lying in a cold frying pan.

From the shabby precipice of my scratchy sheets, I could just about see all the way back to my aunt’s house. Those rainy Tuesday afternoons like a post-coup country the week the last utility fails and the Education Minister starts wearing a lot of epaulets and talking about the sacrifices asked of our noble tradesmen.

We’d sit at her kitchen table with a succession of angry German Shepherds, and she’d revisit the minor grievances of her week. I’d watch the single murky cube in her pissy Scotch sink into a diamond slurry as the French horns on the Easy Listening radio station whined into the dead air of their yellowing pillows.

Simeon Berry won the National Poetry Series for his first collection of poetry, Ampersand Revisited (Fence Books), and his second book of poetry, Monograph (University of Georgia Press). He has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant, and his work has appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, The Iowa Review, and many other journals.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx