Looking into a whiskey glass full of ice under bar room lights by John C. Mannone

The color of sadness is often cold
blue even under the moon glow

of bulbous bar lights. I see her smile
in amber shards, warming, but not

melting the ice forming around my
heart. Each cube refracts the light

of my thoughts every which way
in the whiskey yellow, even after

the last shimmering, the slamming
glass on the counter, the remains

of un-dissolved ghosts haunting
the bitter dregs. Poltergeists dance

in ethereal light. The pallor of my
sheet-white face reflects in the wet

cold cracked mirrors, all broken
by the heavy weight, by the gravity
of depression

while the calculus of reason jostles
toward a singularity, an inescapable

pit of darkness that even a whisper
of bar room light cannot escape.

John C. Mannone has poems in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. He won the SFPA Dwarf Stars Award (2020); was awarded an HWA Scholarship (2017), and a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature; and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His full-length collections are Disabled Monsters (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2015), Flux Lines (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2021), Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2022), and Song of the Mountains (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. He’s a professor of physics & chemistry at Alice Lloyd College nestled in the beautiful southeastern Kentucky mountains.

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