The colleagues would celebrate
closing a case
with the special hidden bottle
of honey-tinted brandy,
the very finest, extremely old.
All the way down it would burn:
grapes of France,
oak of Germany,
and your eyes,
in the end, meeting mine.
Ruth Holzer’s poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Poet Lore, Connecticut River Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets and Blue Unicorn, among others. Her work has also been published in many anthologies. A six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of the chapbooks “The First Hundred Years,” “The Solitude of Cities” and “A Woman Passing.”