Sarah Browning

a man offers me coke in a hotel bar
30 years or more since my last time, racing
through campus as a light snow fell
on the black balloons I gripped, props
left over from my friend Carl’s production
of Suddenly Last Summer, the coke racing
my already high strung body, high strung
my mother’s words for the anxiety she and
my father grew in me with their fractured
union—my father’s fist to the dining table
my mother’s excuse for my father’s fist—
so that in the conference hotel bar the man
has to talk me through it, the bathroom stall
the key, how I only need a little and he’s right
I party with him all night and I am sad, so sad
my life strung along my hurting nerves and
awake, awake despite the booze and later
the weed and the one dry-mouthed kiss
with the man before I call a car and ride
home in the dawn, awake, so awake