XIV. Temperance (Reversed)

Abstinence
by F.J. Bergmann

Everything you pour into yourself,
sooner or later, has to be poured out.
Why let down your hair when you’ll
just have to braid it back up again,
buckle it into those tight, hard knots?
Even if you only pour from one cup
to another, inhaling those dizzying,
aromatic vapors as they rise past you
like opening wings, you’ll still know
exactly what respite you’re missing.
Your brocade gown drags in the mud
at the edge of a dark, bottomless river
(a mirror reflecting an empty sky).
On a rock in shadow stands a peacock
whose back is turned. His tail of glory
will never open again. From cup to cup
a clear liquid flows, back and forth,
and you cannot tell whether you want it,
whether it’s safe to drink.

F.J. Bergmann (we/our) edits poetry for mobiusmagazine.com and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. Work appears irregularly in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov’s, and elsewhere in the alphabet. A Catalogue of the Further Suns won the 2017 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook contest and the 2018 SFPA Elgin Chapbook Award. Fully vaxxed for anything we are likely to encounter.