Lisa Rua-Ware

Wine Making 

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2024: VOL. 39.

They are sweet
red and green, heavy on our vines,
plump fruit dropping
like soft stones, ripe for the press
against my tongue, I pick stems clean, 
savor the seeds meant for the barrel

and my father, he buys more grapes to barrel,
transforms them to 200 gallons of wine, the only sweet
water he drinks from a tall glass and swallows clean,
fruit from our vine
and the purchased ones compressed
in their wooden crates are ready to drop 

into a barrel, drop
like yesterday’s anger into the barrel,
he frees wild sprigs, presses
mound after mound of sweet
berries into a metal crusher, a body once vined
is now squeezed clean, 

flesh hits the bottom barrel clean
like heavy rain, even the skin drops
intentions, they fall from his mind, a vine
he mashes with a two by four while looking down the barrel
he stakes purple must, still sweet,
still lumped, the pressure

is my father’s watchful eyes, pressing
it to be more than it was, to be clean
and red, to bubble and rise, vanish sweetness,
become the strong, dense liquid it must be, drop
its form in the confines of the barrel,
flourish without the vine,

the juice from any vine,  
he pours into jugs, prepares the rest for the press
takes the last sticks and sediments from the barrel,
piles them into the press’s wooden cage, cleaning
out vestiges of the past, he drops
pressure plates on the unsweetened

bones, swings the ratchet press, barrels down,
until drops arrive from broken vines,
until sweet change runs clean off its stem. 

Lisa Rua-Ware is a poet in central Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in San Pedro River Review, Lily Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. When she’s not chasing her two rambunctious kids, she works as a technical writer and loves all things related to paper crafts.