A Note on Wine

Not the win, nor the

wound, but what lets

loose all of that,

what frees the

offering of kiss and

kind and oh

do tell more

Not the fun, nor the

fool, but what gets

out from the lips’

giving in, the

coming that can

bring what was once

loss into that

arena of

win, where what was

dross makes good on its

first, pulsing promise:

in vino veritas.

Joseph Byrd’s work has appeared in Fatal Flaw, South Florida Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, and forthcoming work in WAXING & WANING. He’s a 2022 Pushcart Award nominee, and was in the 2021 StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, he is on the Reading Board for The Plentitudes.