Curse you brown bottle beaded with dew,  

your long, cool draught on a hot July day

and damp-newsprint page night; I detest   

your fresh-bread taste, abhor your cold heft  

in my hand. Curse you, thick mug of dark rum,   

warm in the cold nights and mornings come,  

too soon, after; I hate how you burn down

my throat, turn liquid the ice of my bones.

Curse you red wine in the thin crystal globe,

viscous and luscious and round as the world,

how you bite down on my lips, force bloom

in my March mouth, gold-leaf a gray room.

Curse your slug of raw silk and smoke, its hot lick

at the back of my throat—thick, thick with ache—

Rebecca Foust’s fourth book, God, Seed, won the 2010 Foreword Book of the Year Award and is a 2011 Mass Book Award finalist. All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song won the Many Mountains Moving Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2011 Paterson Prize. Foust’s poems are in current issues of Hudson Review, North American Review, Poetry Daily, Sewanee Review, Woman’s Review of Books, and other journals.