Milk of Magnesia It’s the blue ones we’re after: glass shards rubbed by sand and tide cobalt gems—a far cry from their indelicate past. The ordinary green, white, and brown discs we pocket as well, for they too— though likely remnants of bottles of cheap beer whose contents led to countless poor decisions— have become something beautiful. Should some divine eye look down upon our own manufactured selves, if some almighty hand picked us up flipped us over rubbed us with a seraphic thumb to inspect what we’ve become, would we be collected into a cloud pocket to adorn some celestial summer home or would its gargantuan arm skip us back across the ocean plane to sink again beneath the waves until our pasts were pummeled smooth in the tumult of forgetting and forgiving?
S. C. Donnelly is a writing tutor in Boston. She has been a creative writing workshop leader, a book review editor for the Colorado Review, and a Tupelo Press’ 30/30 poet in 2022. She has published two poems in The Charles River Review and several online book reviews.
Amethyst Review 