Villanelle That Should Be Read While Drinking An Extra Dirty Martini

    A contoured villanelle using “Kissing the Bartender” by Julie Kane

I order an extra dirty martini while standing at the bar. 
I can’t tell if these men around me are thirty-six or six.
There’s always something, someone shining like a star.

A drink or four to hush men’s voices thumping from afar.
Hundreds of casting calls, but no offers, nothing sticks,
so I’m here, feeling dirty, among the men at the bar.

Men—the business—only one is fun when hard,
and with both, nothing good ever seems to stick.
There’s always something, someone far off like a star.

I am winged lightning screwed into a mason jar.
My talent and what earns money, never mix
as easy as these martinis and the dirty men at the bar.

I left home in my 20s. Mom said I was moving too far 
too fast, but I need more than just my forehead kissed.
There’s always something, someone shining like a star,

just never me. I'll drag a man home—feathered, tarred,
metaphorically—sex, at times, is acting. I’m pissed 
and can't just sit here, aging, sucking olives at a dirty bar,
dreaming of being something, someone who is a star.

DUSTIN BROOKSHIRE & KERRY TRAUTMAN

Dustin Brookshire’s (he/him) fourth and latest chapbook is Repeat as Needed (Harbor Editions, 2025). He is a co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville, 2023) and editor of When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton (Harbor Editions, 2024). Learn more at dustinbrookshire.com.

Kerry Trautman (she/her) is a lifelong Ohioan whose poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her books are: Things That Come in Boxes; To Have Hoped; Artifacts; To Be Nonchalantly Alive; Marilyn: Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas; Unknowable Things; and Irregulars. More at linktr.ee/OhioKerry.