Vapors

I fill my glass with fog, sometimes, the grace
of it diffuse: You, gaseous somewhere. Breath
is loss; confess: A palm before my face
grows damp with gone. It's maybe in the wet
of some man's retina, the water runs
once it has left, or in the perfect beads,
late mornings, warm brown bread with cinnamon
leaves on a cobalt glaze. The pristine weep
of this iced gin I'll drain, I praise—a flow
through pirates, dodos, dinosaurs, all pores
perspiring steam soon you, soon us. And so
it goes, just borrowed. So the haunting, pour
or frost, is fluid as the thirst you'd slake,
a need now clear, now prism, now opaque.

- Megan Grumbling (from The Baltimore Review)

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