Denise Alden
ELEGY
Day drinking 1983-2023
The deciding factor may have been the cancer or its treatments,
or maybe the specter of its return looming outside the periphery
of relief, but it’s finally happened: day-drinking is no more.
Remember the arctic AC of dive bars, their shiny pool tables
with warped cues leaning on each other in the corner like we did
as the beer sang in our veins along to the songs on the jukebox?
Acrid ethanol breath of men on my neck, in my ear, men
I didn’t even know offering advice on how to sink the eight ball,
a carny show of acting the way they thought men acted.
And the smoke! Remember the smoke? I wove my way
through it as I stalked around the table, held my cue the way
my father did, mirroring him. He was left-handed but held
the cue right-handed, and I just the opposite. One of the boys
remarked Lucy, I didn’t know you were a lefty. Right, left, girl, boy.
The binary is so 2016, isn’t it? Never really real, but enforced like a law
sinking in its own muddy, immoral ineptitude. Trans is the way
of everything before it, everything elemental. Imagine denying
a butterfly its name because you first knew them as a caterpillar.
Imagine quaffing thirteen beers in an evening then popping
up like a daisy the next morning. Now the only daisies on are the grave
of those days and one afternoon martini, the incipient dowager’s
signature drink, roils the belly all night. Now all the smoke is gone.
I mourn the way the fresh air punched it right out of me, a relief
nearly religious in its pleasure when I stepped outside the dark
into the heat of those now forever lost, late afternoons.