Easter Lilies

I drop a sugar cube into the glass, and it fizzes up through the cheap vodka and warm champagne. and you grin that crooked grin, and we mumble on about paintings and books and little flower shops that smell like life.

the spaghetti sauce is bubbling on the stove, that tired chink-chink against the pot nobody ever scrubs clean. on our table, crystal glasses with swans etched on them — who the hell owns shit like that? — the Cabernet breathing, champagne cocktails first, because why not start drunk.

and suddenly I’m thinking about some village up in Northern Ireland, those black hedgerows closing in like a fist, Easter lilies poking through the mud, rain that never quite stops — and the ache hits me so hard I almost believe I was born there, died there, got drunk there a thousand times.

then the bubble pops.

just my head again.

you were never in the room, the glass is half empty, and the swans on the crystal are laughing at me.

Easter lilies bloom
in a country I never lived—
the sauce is burning.