Sarah Cooper

PINOT GRIGIO

Always I am always thirsty and needing to have more. This is more than true. If you get on your knees in the supermarket you can find the biggest and cheapest bottle of pinot grigio on the bottom shelf. It will be dusty and dazed but it's drinkable, you know? And I am a feaster of wine, as you know. I sample whites from California and New Zealand, sucking my tongue into a V to let the droplets seep into the buds of my tastes. I sip from stemless glasses, let my lips linger around a rim only to remember this mouth has appraised its apple finish with a pear beginning before. The tasting is the antithesis of you: never have I seen you as a washed wine glass, a goblet repurposed. I cup you inside my hands, fingers interlocked let you slosh freely, never spilling. On rainy days my ambitious self wants to sketch a map, show you spaces that are me (land) and the projected me (water). But you would see the lakes and streams pouring through and question if I am drowning in possibilities. (I'm not.) I breaststroke these waters as a test: the potential of drowning is scary because really anything can happen and I've never been to sure about leg cramps or what lurks in the great lakes but with you I can float (eyes closed, supine). I'm intelligently captivated with you, rippled into the current of your sea kelp eyes. I thirst for you. It began as an evening like all the rest with me writing and the candles flickering against my stemmed wine glass, three sips left, final inspiration or a generous numbing to stanzas. I read. I swallow. I reach for you.

Sarah Cooper holds an MA from Purdue University and an MFA from Converse College. Her poems have appeared in Sling Magazine, Cahaba Literary Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, The Way the Light Slants, and Night Owl. Like Sarah her writing is inextricably queer.