Lit up and out of tune she’d bawl
to make her ten green bottles fall
but near the end, its song and dance,
they came down like an avalanche;
decades of empties drained and tossed
in stairwells, basements, cellars, lost
to blackouts or, pulled back once more,
a locked ward off a corridor
it took a white gowned summer
of heat and gauze to wheel her down.
Dried out by autumn, washed and dressed,
she’d idled into brittleness,
stick-thin with rage, with nicotine,
the doped rice paper of her skin
too yellow now, too old, too wrong
to bottlebank a singalong
or raise, hoarse from its shattered past,
through lacerations of smashed glass,
her voice again, uproarious.
