The Whiskey Thief by Jeff Bernstein

Wander amid the racks
of curvaceous vessels,

broad-hipped sirens,
you could linger with

any one for an hour
or a lifetime

while obligatory showers
shine the macadam out front.

It’s just one short step
to congress with a sweet

smoky cask, liquid
seeps and flows

in reverse, amber glow
like ancient gas lamps.

That bordello of barrels
is dark, cold and beautiful.

You need one deft thumb
at the controls before

finally letting go,
letting go is an art

not a science.
And the release:

peat, fruit, spice, smoke
flowers all catch in throat

for minutes, even hours
if you are that good.

A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein divides his time between Boston and Central Vermont. Poetry is his favorite and earliest art form (he can’t draw a whit or hold a tune). He would most have liked to have been, like Thoreau, “an inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms… [a] surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes.” Recent poems have appeared, or will shortly, in, among others, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Best Indie Lit New England, The Centrifugal Eye, Cooweescoowee, Edison Literary Review, Grasslimb, The Kerf, The Midwest Quarterly, Mulberry Fork Review, Paper Nautilus, Pinyon, Plum Tree Tavern, Reckless Writing Poetry Anthology, Rockhurst Review, Silkworm and Tipton Poetry Journal.  He is the author of two chapbooks; his full-length collection “Nightfall, Full of Light” was published in December 2017 by Turning Point. His writer's blog is at www.hurricanelodge.com.