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"To Fill Their Glasses Once Again" & "The Poem Escapes Me" by April Ridge

To Fill Their Glasses Once Again


Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and 

Frederico Garcia Lorca 

walk into a bar.


That’s all. No joke.


Just one magical evening 

in a dusty corner of a long-forgotten dive bar

where poets convene 

to drink coffee and laugh at 

the sadness and ridiculousness of humanity.


We aim to please our personal demons

while the crowd outside struggles to keep warm,

clustered at the dusky windows,

using torn sleeves to clean the pane

to get a closer look inside at the splendor

that is a small group of dangerously beautiful minds

coming together to explore the foundations of joy,

the meaning of life, and the spaces between time.


Ginsberg says to Whitman

‘Ooh what have you done to your hair, Walt?

It’s vibrant and alive tonight.

It really brings out your eyes!’


Whitman shyly smiles and

tosses his tresses back like 

a shy high school girl about to hit her prime.


Lorca sighs and sips his almost-empty cup,

his luck worn thin. 

Salty as the bottom of sailor’s boots,

he rises to fill their glasses once again.



The Poem Escapes Me 


I thought of a poem 

on my way home in the car and 

when I turned to look at it 

when I parked 

it had gone.


Must have snuck out 

the window 

when I was daydreaming, 

looking up 

at a yellow sky with 

the sun 

in my tired eyes.


You know I like to run the ac and 

roll the windows down 

on these hot summer days 

on the way home. 


A small luxury I afford myself 

for windswept hair and 

chilly feet after a long day of 

gazing into the abyss of 

nowhere-near retirement, of 

too-short weekends teasing 

luridly 

from the beginning of 

a long week.


The poem escapes me regularly,

as life does at times 

when I get too focused on 

staring internally,

not looking at the sun,

the stars

the people who surround me.


The air hanging desperately 

in spaces

just waiting 

to be discovered

were every day 

a Saturday

with no plans.




April Ridge lives in the expansive hopes and dreams of melancholy rescue cats. She thrives on strong coffee, and lives for danger. In the midst of Indiana pines, she follows her heart out to the horizon of reality and hopes never to return to the misty sands of the nightmarish 9 to 5. April aspires to beat seasonal depression with a well-carved stick, and to one day experience the splendor of the Cucumber Magnolia tree in bloom.

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