Champagne can be kept effervescent
by putting a knife in the open bottle
Claudia Emerson
Delight, too long on the tongue,
or in our lover’s arms and we hunt
for aspirin, even consider clothes.
Take heed of that elegant stemware
breeding in the sink. Tilt imagined solitude
to the lips, but handle any knife with care.
Some French bubbles may find brief
life support in a grinding stone, or crave
an anxious hop on pleasure’s whetted edge.
I have only to picture a stone mason’s chisel
in the open magnum of our love, worrying
out our letters and dates, to find fizz enough.
John O’Dell: Australia, O’Dell’s birthplace, and the U.S. where he grew up, engage his poetic imagination. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Review, The Baltimore Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The George Mason Review, The Atlanta Review, and others. Work appears in several anthologies including Free State: A Harvest of Maryland Poets, and Hungry As We Are and Maryland In Poetry. O’Dell was a 1997 Individual Artist Award recipient from the Maryland State Arts Council and am the author of three collections of poems, Painting at Night, (Little Cove Press, 1994) At Beauty’s Pawnshop (Xlibris 2013.) and Sons and Tattoos (Main Street Rag 2021)
