Julie Valin		Kicking a Bull in the Balls (for Todd Cirillo) When I told him drinking alone is the stuff of legends, he said, “I’d rather kick a bull in the balls than be here alone.” With all the greats holding up their fists in their graves, he got the truth just in time— a single barstool in a crowded drinking hole is not where you take the muse by the neck; it is the guts it takes to go home to her that will give the poems brawn to endure.		Cereal Killer Of course there were those careless nights of cereal for dinner before too many tequila shots, another new guy brought home, the cat watching me breathe into a paper bag, the bathroom floor— my grave— where I will land when I hit my head on the edge of the porcelain lip while he watches the 2AM static. Or meeting at the bar, another found stranger, up at the counter I felt pretty because that’s what booze was for in a world of the young, and we drank well into the night but he was cold the way he looked in my eyes, and his kiss on the curb soft yet fierce, so I kept doing it, and let him walk me to his car where he drove me home on my drunken directions, when all I wanted to do was get in bed with my cat and sleep til noon, which was opposite of his intentions and he hated so much the word no in the dizzy doorframe, I kept saying it each time the unlit room spun around until I finally got it across to him, and I made sure to watch for his dark shape to leave in the right direction from my front window. I did sleep til noon and upon entering the warm light of the kitchen sun on the counter: 1 knife stabbed directly into my box of Lucky Charms, butcher handle pointed up. Taking it as a bargain instead of a threat, I poured myself a bowl.