unexpected sherry

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 accouterments

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