Golden Age Drinking

From some neighbor’s place, “Moon River.”
It trickles down the stairs & under our door.
It puts chopsticks in my chignon & spritzes you with Youth Dew.
In the Mansion of Many Apartments,
the 60s is a locked rec room we can’t get into.
They’ve changed the code. I guess
we just have to stand naked in the hallway
under the energy efficient light bulbs.
Modernity is the worst fate: it bumps you with its fist.
It kitches the apple blossoms & commodifies the owls.
There is so very little time left to love in the Grand Old Style.
If you’re coming to collect me, please do it quickly.
I’ve made you a highball. I’ve sung you a song.
Look. The Century’s Parade shimmies away from us:
flash of brass, pomp of parasol, heat haze.
“Moon River” tapers & we start to bicker.
What has our anonymous neighbor done to us this time?
And with us out of ice & so prone to golden age drinking?
I don’t know what a huckleberry friend is, but I suspect
it is something we hold too tight in the dark
when we know we should be rowing.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books, as well as Scorpionica (New Michigan Press) and The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (forthcoming from Willow Springs Editions). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, West Branch, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan and her PhD from the University of Houston, where she also served as the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast. Karyna is the 2015-2016 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.