Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize, and On Shifting Shoals. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives on the Atlantic coast of the US, with the ocean as her backyard and muse.
Glass Figurine
Light
lusts
after glass
shaped like a
tiny Hershey’s kiss
that sits on the mantel.
I savor it on my open palm.
A gift, like every kiss ought to be,
desiring to be desired, melting all that’s
cold or lonely behind pressed lips. This, a
lucky kiss, kissed back by sun that leaps across
our room, releases indigo, ruby, violet, all the hues
it didn’t know could be lit inside it. I don’t remember
which of us first found that kiss, ambling through the
department store, looking for some mixing bowl or
cheese grater, but we both knew when we saw it,
we’d take it home – that kiss, our gift.