{"id":84,"date":"2026-04-07T21:10:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T21:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/?page_id=84"},"modified":"2026-05-01T18:30:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T18:30:43","slug":"cocktail-olive","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/poetry\/cocktail-olive\/","title":{"rendered":"Cocktail Olive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marie Anne Arreola<\/span><\/p>\n

I want to make sense of it all\u2014 this semantic shift,<\/span><\/p>\n

this tilting world of language and flesh,<\/span><\/p>\n

my hands in the dirt, knuckled deep,<\/span><\/p>\n

caked and bleeding, digging<\/span><\/p>\n

as if meaning could be unearthed,<\/span><\/p>\n

as if the small bird bodies<\/span><\/p>\n

I uncover, hollow-boned,<\/span><\/p>\n

could explain the wreck of things,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

how to clear the wetness,<\/span><\/p>\n

how to bring light back to ground,<\/span><\/p>\n

exposure becoming its own ceremony:<\/span><\/p>\n

naked, immodest, the raw striations of earth<\/span><\/p>\n

pocked with evidence of my passing,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and I’m creating from disposition,<\/span><\/p>\n

from the aftermath, sweeping the ruins<\/span><\/p>\n

into trash bags or leaf piles<\/span><\/p>\n

or paper boxes,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

their corners soft with rain,<\/span><\/p>\n

feeding from destruction,<\/span><\/p>\n

thriving on the bare slate of something<\/span><\/p>\n

newly birthed, keening, half-alive,<\/span><\/p>\n

its mouth opening toward sky.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I am curled at the bottom<\/span><\/p>\n

of a champagne flute,<\/span><\/p>\n

glass walls narrowing above me,<\/span><\/p>\n

speared through like a cocktail olive,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

my slick green body caught between<\/span><\/p>\n

celebration and aftermath,<\/span><\/p>\n

straining gin from my underwear<\/span><\/p>\n

in the July heat, breathing through<\/span><\/p>\n

the little blue cloud of his evaporation<\/span><\/p>\n

because he left me in the rubble:<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

a handful of collar stays,<\/span><\/p>\n

the smell of starch and loss,<\/span><\/p>\n

his shirts still holding the shape<\/span><\/p>\n

of his shoulders\u2014 and I hear his voice<\/span><\/p>\n

dryly muttering from the closet walls<\/span><\/p>\n

as I peel him off me, strip away his syntax,<\/span><\/p>\n

his grammar of possession,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

because he wanted something young and wise,<\/span><\/p>\n

an instrument with handsome strings,<\/span><\/p>\n

but I’m no longer an instrument.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’m the music that refuses to end,<\/span><\/p>\n

that keeps playing in empty rooms.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We will brake, as in a river brake,<\/span><\/p>\n

a tangle of life where the current slows,<\/span><\/p>\n

as in the archaeological kind,<\/span><\/p>\n

worth excavating, worth sifting through<\/span><\/p>\n

with careful hands, not as in stopping<\/span><\/p>\n

but as in transforming motion into memory,<\/span><\/p>\n

velocity into sediment.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The laws of physics<\/span><\/p>\n

promise energy cannot be destroyed\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

only changed, matter collapsing<\/span><\/p>\n

into other matter; atoms shifting<\/span><\/p>\n

but remaining themselves,<\/span><\/p>\n

faithful to their own small orbits,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and we are more complex than that,<\/span><\/p>\n

more reckless in our undoing,<\/span><\/p>\n

because when we disaster<\/span><\/p>\n

we disaster completely,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

we erupt and consume,<\/span><\/p>\n

burn through our entire systems of meaning,<\/span><\/p>\n

leave ash where language used to live,<\/span><\/p>\n

and we name it fire ecology, sinkhole,<\/span><\/p>\n

tornado, tsunami, avalanche,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

we name it epidemic, oil spill,<\/span><\/p>\n

meltdown, we name it love,<\/span><\/p>\n

each catastrophe its own form of worship,<\/span><\/p>\n

each ruin a god chained<\/span><\/p>\n

to what it once destroyed,<\/span><\/p>\n

still burning in the wreckage,<\/span><\/p>\n

and yet after it\u2019s done<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

we come back\u2014to mitochondria,<\/span><\/p>\n

to seed germination,<\/span><\/p>\n

to the patient work of moss<\/span><\/p>\n

splitting stone.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We rebuild through glass,<\/span><\/p>\n

through the geometry of crystals,<\/span><\/p>\n

through bees and their quiet golden industry,<\/span><\/p>\n

and the original meaning of disaster<\/span><\/p>\n

is an unfavorable planet, a failed star,<\/span><\/p>\n

even language mourns its orbit,<\/span><\/p>\n

even words remember their falling.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019d lend you my back\u2014the unblossomed part,<\/span><\/p>\n

the skin still soft enough to bear your weight,<\/span><\/p>\n

but I wouldn\u2019t take your back in return<\/span><\/p>\n

because that pain isn\u2019t simple,<\/span><\/p>\n

isn\u2019t just red and tender,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

there\u2019s a pain in telling you why<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to understand it all\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

only how the body transforms<\/span><\/p>\n

from good to bad to too bad, slowly,<\/span><\/p>\n

in the middle of loving you,<\/span><\/p>\n

in the middle of the night,<\/span><\/p>\n

in the middle of life,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

how it happens cell by cell,<\/span><\/p>\n

how it happens like moss,<\/span><\/p>\n

and who can speak tenderly<\/span><\/p>\n

about the end, about how we tend<\/span><\/p>\n

to the dying\u2014like sheep, like sleepwalking,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

like pulling weeds from a garden<\/span><\/p>\n

we\u2019ll never see bloom, and I\u2019m sorry<\/span><\/p>\n

for the world, I\u2019m sorry for everything<\/span><\/p>\n

that is not tender, for the shape of love<\/span><\/p>\n

that grew into a tumor,<\/span><\/p>\n

a geometry that devours tenderness<\/span><\/p>\n

and calls it devotion, and the body<\/span><\/p>\n

keeps building around it, endlessly,<\/span><\/p>\n

like crystals in a cave no one will enter.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

God, if she exists,<\/span><\/p>\n

is your mother pounding on the door\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Wake up, wake up, we\u2019re late!<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and she\u2019s fastening the top button<\/span><\/p>\n

of your nicest shirt,<\/span><\/p>\n

dragging a comb across<\/span><\/p>\n

your scalp until it stings,<\/span><\/p>\n

and God is the feeling of a collar<\/span><\/p>\n

strangling you and the breathless scramble<\/span><\/p>\n

to the car and the smallness of being<\/span><\/p>\n

herded into church halfway through the sermon.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

God is the moment you try<\/span><\/p>\n

to disappear and fail,<\/span><\/p>\n

the moment you realize<\/span><\/p>\n

you were never invisible<\/span><\/p>\n

to begin with,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

that you\u2019ve been<\/span><\/p>\n

building yourself,<\/span><\/p>\n

slowly,<\/span><\/p>\n

into something seen,<\/span><\/p>\n

and green, and grinned,<\/span><\/p>\n

and flavored.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marie Anne Arreola I want to make sense of it all\u2014 this semantic shift, this tilting world of language and flesh, my hands in the dirt, knuckled deep, caked and bleeding, digging as if meaning could be unearthed, as if the small bird bodies I uncover, hollow-boned, could explain the wreck of things,   how… <\/p>\n

Read more Cocktail Olive<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-84","page","type-page","status-publish","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":388,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84\/revisions\/388"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}