Drunken Moon. By John C. Mannone

It’s a blue moon tonight, but it’s not really blue,

just platinum on the cusp of August and it’s hot,

just as it’s been in Alabama last week or Maryland

on the beach years ago when I was ten. You were

seventy-two and drinking Chianti from a jug-poured

orange juice glass with a dozen facets running

up and down the glass. Thank you for those few

sips of red wine. You taught me never to cheat

myself—that there was no need to sneak a drink,

let alone get drunk, except years later I might

have just once, just once in a blue moon.

Today, I don’t get drunk—I don’t care what phase

the moon is in. And I don’t drink that Blue Moon

beer either. The orange slice wouldn’t make it

palatable anyway, especially in the bitter hot

dog days of summer when I might want to drink

myself silly because I was thinking about you

just wishing you were here, Dad, to sip a little

starlight with me and reel in the joy of a drunken

moon.

John C. Mannone has poems appearing/accepted in the 2020 Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, North Dakota Quarterly, The Menteur, Blue Fifth Review, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. His poetry won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest (2020). He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His latest of three collections, Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love and Poetry, is forthcoming from Linnet’s Wings Press (2020). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. A retired physics professor, he lives near Knoxville, Tennessee. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com