Three Bottles

Posted on 2021/04/14 by Bartholomew Barker

For today’s prompt from Robert Lee Brewer’s Write Better Poetry blog, write a poem inspired only by stimulus from where you’re sitting (or standing, if you write will standing). In the past, I’ve written poems about pencils, characters in books I can see, and things I can see out my window when using this prompt. So consider your immediate surroundings and poem away today.

Three Bottles

I keep three bottles of memories
on my desk, collected years ago,
distilled to essential oils.

The first smells of mothballs
and grandma— playing in her house
of lush upholstery and affection.

The second smells like piña colada
from the body spray of a girlfriend
who lost her bra in my bed.

The third has been forgotten,
its plastic sprayer clogged with some emotion—
grief, rage or terror. Who knows?

I could crack the lid, sealed shut by time
but some vessels are best left unopened.

About Bartholomew Barker

Bartholomew Barker is one of the organizers of Living Poetry, a collection of poets and poetry lovers in the Triangle region of North Carolina. Born and raised in Ohio, studied in Chicago, he worked in Connecticut for nearly twenty years before moving to Hillsborough where he makes money as a computer programmer to fund his poetry habit.

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