Dionysus Approves

BY ALICIA LAI

Here is a joke: a zucchini walks into a bar, leans
and calls, bartender, a shot of whiskey and a glass
of Chardonnay—and the bartender shivers
and says he is needed by the harbor,
a lemon peel clenched between his teeth.
Ask for Rueda, Bacardi torched cherry,
Galicia by the bottle, but he says he does not
gamble. The spades are after him
the way the Russian mafia drop
by for tea. This could be a good joke,
if it were told in an Armenian marketplace
where children turn to birds. I say I do not like
to gamble and I do not know wines, each
exotic like the girls you cannot keep
—Loire, Reuilly, Chablis. When
he nods, he holds the fluted neck
and pours.

Alicia Lai was recently named a 2014 United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts by the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities. In addition, she has been named a 2014 YoungArts Finalist in Writing and runner-up for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Poetry Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, National Poetry Quarterly, The Apprentice Writer, and a previous issue of The Adroit Journal, among others. She is the Founder & Editor-in-Chief of The Postscript Journal, and an incoming freshman at Princeton University.