Recipe: Obituary Cocktail

4 jiggers gin
½ jigger dry vermouth
½ jigger absinthe

1. Swarm the gin over ice, over your thighs, over the gin-shaped hole I sometimes hear in your voice.

2. If you wanted the vermouth to be sweet, it wouldn’t be enough death, so quit your wishing.

We need pine. We need wasps. We need blood orange pips. We need to be baked and desiccated until only the garden lines of our arteries remain.

3. “Absinthe” sounds like “casualty,” like you 700 miles away. Pour absinthe of doubt, absinthe of malice, absinthe that makes the heart go slack.

4. Shake, strain. Drink until the shake and juniper abate, until you’ve nothing left but the sting of lead and beads and wormwood glow.

Until you’re nothing more than pummel and fennel and strain, always strain.

B. Tyler Lee is the author of one short poetry collection, With Our Lungs in Our Hands (Redbird Chapbooks, 2016), and her nonfiction essay “●A large volume of small nonsenses” won the 2020 Talking Writing Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Jet Fuel Review, Blue Mesa Review, Qwerty Literary Journal, Dream of the River: LGBTQ Anthology (Jacar Press), and elsewhere. She teaches in the Midwest