"To Sally, When the Wine Runs Out" • ROLE MODEL (by Sally Toner)

Shouldn’t you be flipping the cool pillow up top and falling back to sleep? 

Without the earphone mask and the podcast at 3 a.m. when you never had trouble resting before? But the thoughts are ticks you burn with a match and pluck out one 

by one then douse with antiseptic gin. 

Shouldn’t you be lava meeting sand, starting off all crusty, then the unbreakable cool–the kind of earth they couldn’t run plumbing under back in the day, so they poured their piss from windows to mix with drizzle in the Scottish sky? Shouldn’t you fly back to Edinburgh and tour 

the Holy Rood?

Shouldn’t you be making plans because you left a tumor carcass in your chest and grew your flesh back with your hair? It may be the same dull color it always was, but sometimes,

when you video message a friend, and the light hits your eyes just right, you impress yourself with how pretty your blues can be. 

Shouldn’t you ask yourself every morning what the universe has to teach? Even when you don’t think the universe gives a damn most days? Shouldn’t you reframe the questions:

What did I learn yesterday? 

What might I learn today? 

Shouldn’t you pound erasers out under the dogwoods, chat with the ancestors–

Red cardinals, incessant–before you return to write again on the chalkboard 

of your ethos? Shouldn’t you remember you are rarely, if ever, 

the smartest person in the room? 

Shouldn’t you listen? Listen to crickets, frogs, cicadas, water as it bitch slaps stone. 

Listen to your children, your parents, your lover, your friends. Listen–even though your ears 

are failing–and you race to hear it all as the frequencies disappear 

one by one. 

Shouldn’t you sing and sing and sing while you still can? Shouldn’t you keep 

swimming? Shouldn’t you give yourself the grace to nap on the couch, smush with your cat, bingewatch Greys or chase a cormorant around the lake? Shouldn’t you eat the oysters, 

drink the wine before it runs out?

Because it will.

Sally Huggins Toner (she/her) has lived in the Washington D.C. area for over 30 years. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in Northern Virginia Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Watershed Review, and other publications. Her chapbook Anansi and Friends was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. She received an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of Georgia. An empty nester with two grown daughters, she lives in Reston, Virginia with her husband. You can find her at sallytoner.com, @salliemander.bsky.social on Bluesky, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-toner-65290346/ on LinkedIn, salliemander70 on Instagram, and on X at @SallyToner