After Divorce Meditation

I am learning how to linger in bars.

Alone, rehearsing the names of red wines –

Temp – rrrah – ni – yo                   and

Coat – du – Rhône –

my mouth slowing as a way to honor

how these varietals have aged.

I watch the woman

with thick, long, straight grays

cut in a blunt line across her shoulder blades.

I trace the rim of my stemless glass, looking up.

Is this how you meet people?

Sit at a high-top table trying

to look literary with my black-rimmed glasses, my pashmina,

my lips occasionally pursing, smiling bemusedly

to myself? I’m sure I’m drinking too quickly.

Do you think someone

would approach me here? Now? Tonight? Should I

flirt with the bartender? I am probably too old

for the woman with the brown pixie cut at the next table,

her tattoos, her browsing of books for sale – there is a freedom,

a hopefulness, in this alcohol-infused languish. In occupying

a space designed for this exact purpose. In the glow

of white lights strung along exposed beam, mortared stone,

two men flirt at the table reserved for the French meeting.

They have remained, now turning their bodies toward one another

in perceived privacy. They lock eyes and loosen

their winter scarves as the low light nurtures

all of our confidences – the way

it has always done –

and those of us basking in this warm, fuzzy luminescence

feel, for this moment at least, together.

________

Gina R. Evers’s poems have appeared in About Place Journal, as the winner of the Gival Press Oscar Wilde award, and in The Comstock Review and Quarterly West among other journals. Her work is featured in Lady Business: A Celebration of Lesbian Poetry (Sibling Rivalry Press), and she has received fellowships from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and the Lambda Literary Foundation. Evers holds degrees from Ithaca College and American University, and she currently serves as Writing Center Director at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY.