Winning Poem, Alliteration Contest: Makers' Marks, Kelly Scott Franklin

Kelly Scott Franklin has published poems and translations in Able Muse, Nimrod, Literary Matters, Driftwood Press Literary Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, National Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Light Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews have appeared in Commonweal, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College, and lives in Michigan with his wife and daughters.

Makers' Marks

-For Kristine

I know the brandy freckles and the rum-drop rains

dotting the drafts of Edgar Poe, and I can tell

a tale of manuscripts so marred by circle stains

they might be maps for walking tours of Dante’s hell.

I’ve seen Fitzgerald’s proofs, with pale gin rickey rings,

the purple laudanum splashes that De Quincey made;

I caught that cedar note of whiskey where it clings

to every line that Dylan Thomas ever laid.

A fleck of red vermouth, a dark negroni drip

in notebooks Hemingway brought with him to the bar,

the ghost-green absinthe Oscar Wilde preferred to sip,

the slops of crazy Balzac’s coffee, black as tar.

For years, I shook my head: how could I understand

clearsighted writers drinking till they’re bleary-eyed?

But now at night I sit here staring, glass in hand,

trying to spell out where we found you, how you died.