Jennifer Michael Hecht.
It’s Thursday, as good a day as any for an incisive and surprising poem by Jennifer Michael Hecht about a hangover. We liked it because of the way it evokes the light mantle of head-clouded shame that follows too much bourbon or rum; its wrapping, self-analyzing lines convey the cloudiness and the strange clarity that come the day after drinking too much. Who hasn’t vowed that “nothing that ever happened/ will happen again?” —Meghan O’Rourke
EPISODE Too much to drink last night and now the symbol claps of shame in August. Had I been wine-wise, I’d have been at work for hours by now, but no. Television is more relieving than I’d guessed, I watched a show I’d never seen before because I tend from terrors on the molestation line. It was easier to take than TV news whose theme today is also how someone who had once been a girl had been abused. Outside the sky is blue and bright white clouds remind me that the other news has been wildfires in California, with pyrocumulus soot clouds rising white in the blue sky. This shame of too much drink is shockingly tenacious. I tell myself it is no crime to be seen in cups now and again, but find I can’t be disabused. I hold it all against me. There must be water in these clouds though, and freedom here, and nothing that ever happened will happen again.
EPISODE
Too much to drink last night and now the symbol claps of shame in August. Had I been wine-wise, I’d have been at work for hours by now, but no. Television is more relieving than I’d guessed, I watched a show I’d never seen before because I tend from terrors on the molestation line. It was easier to take than TV news whose theme today is also how someone who had once been a girl had been abused. Outside the sky is blue and bright white clouds remind me that the other news has been wildfires in California, with pyrocumulus soot clouds rising white in the blue sky. This shame of too much drink is shockingly tenacious. I tell myself it is no crime to be seen in cups now and again, but find I can’t be disabused. I hold it all against me.
There must be water in these clouds though, and freedom here, and nothing that ever happened will happen again.
Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of three history books and two volumes of poetry. Her most recent book is The Happiness Myth.
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