Crisp. Wine
as nail polish remover
Wide,
then stopping sweet
The taste
of mentorship
A working
crush, a kooky inspiration
to be
better than I am
It’s the
manly-sweet voice in my head
A small
girl’s pattern
watching
her own performance from just inside the door
I try
harder
to be
worthy of his momentary attention,
to show
qualities translatable on a mother’s tongue
My dad
kept a small bottle of
acetone-laced
liquid in a vial in his desk
MacGyver-like
agent that cleaned mistakes
and misspent
glue
Later we
found it among his
I am to
be writing my annual review
Assess
professional contributions
as I
twirl a tiny glass
Test
tacky connections to colleagues
who might
value my performance
from
secondhand account
I must revisit
each strength and gap
in a year
I wish to forget
Perhaps I
can submit a poem
My only
product ever given full marks
by my
father – even though
he never
read them through to the end
© lila.p.levy, March 2013
