That Bottle of Corona ...

Lucinda Williams

Side 1 Track 2

And she’s holding a Corona and it’s cold against her hand

Odd how it’s the cold bottle that brings memory

back, not the beer or the lime pushed through

the neck, tongue licking bits of pulp off

the lip. That first long swig on the empty beach,

Hatteras, early 80s, hot afternoons sitting around

a dive bar named Ruckers, ordering 300

10 cent shrimp covered in Old Bay, lips burning,

Carolina blue sky, cold bottle after cold bottle

of Corona, the shape of it still in my hand long after

sundown, babies in porta cribs, kids on sleeping

bags, blow-up mattresses, scattered around

the tiny cottage, boys in a stanky shed eight feet

down on sand, Leigh and George, Patti and me,

at the formica table, light flickering from a candle

dripping down a bottle of chianti wrapped

in straw, no phone, no tv, the four of us naïve

as sleeping children in the dark about hurricanes

to come, sea oats and dunes disappearing beneath

waves rolling under our beds at high tide, the greed

of oily entrepreneurs, soulless profiteers, beach

cottage after beach cottage listing, falling in the drink.

—SL, Port Royal, SC, May 2022