Seeing a Bottle of Woodford Reserve at the Grocery

by Colleen Harris

You can’t make bourbon

without corn, and you can’t

grow corn without the right

type of soil. Soil gets beneath

fingernails, and fingernails

dug into his back over muscle

leaving tiny sicklemarks where

an angel’s wings would have

grown, and wings mean flying

which also means falling, like

goose feathers, like the ones filling

the flat pillow he tucked under

your heavy head one humid June

night in central Kentucky after

three too many glasses of woodsy

vanilla notes, the caramel hint,

the bite of rye in the bourbon

still haunting his questing tongue.

BIO: Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University and serves as a Poetry Editor at Iron Oaks Editions. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (forthcoming 2025), Babylon Songs (forthcoming 2026), These Terrible Sacraments, The Kentucky Vein, God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems, and chapbooks Toothache in the Bone (forthcoming 2025), That Reckless Sound, and Some Assembly Required. You can find her as @warmaiden on Instagram/Bluesky/Twitter