“oenosis”
by nupur chowdhury
Oenosis (n.)
from oinos, Greek for wine
the slow alchemy of fruit into spirit, sweetness into ache.
✶ ✶ ✶
At first, abundance—
every night a glass too full,
sweetness rushing the blood,
loneliness blurred to warmth.
It felt like devotion,
the pour unending,
the room bright with gold.
But indulgence dulls.
Too much sweetness numbs the tongue;
the long steep slackened what held us.
What seemed like safety
bent easily into risk.
Hunger sharpened,
boundaries softened,
and the night turned.
Overpour drowns discernment.
It leaves the body pliable,
calls the overproof warmth devotion,
until the burn reveals itself too late.
This was never vintage—
never something aged into depth.
Only pulp,
over-soaked,
coming apart in the glass.
Still, there lingers the ghost of that first sip,
bright as rescue,
sharp with promise,
impossible to forget—
knowing it was always marked to spoil.
artist statement
this piece began as an attempt to capture the texture of a friendship that collapsed under its own weight. at first, it felt luminous—like abundance, like something that could blur loneliness into belonging. but over time, the dynamic revealed itself as a kind of overindulgence: not deepening with age, but softening, flattening, dissolving into something unsteady. i wanted the poem to follow that progression formally, moving from fullness to slackness to a sudden unraveling, the way too much of a good thing becomes ruin.
writing it required a kind of retroactive clarity. i’d excused behaviors that, in hindsight, put me in unsafe or compromising positions. i rationalized them as loyalty, as closeness, when really they exposed a selfishness i was reluctant to name. what complicated the process further was realizing that everyone around me saw the break coming long before i did. when the friendship ended, they treated it almost as a relief. that gap between my lived attachment and their external clarity became part of what the piece had to hold: the way intimacy distorts judgment, the way sweetness dulls the palate.
alcohol became the central metaphor because it captured that double-bind so precisely. intoxication has its thrill, but it also erodes discernment; the very warmth it offers leaves you pliable, unguarded, too easily convinced devotion is in the pour. i used that language to structure the poem’s rhythm: swelling with generosity at first, then numbing, then collapsing once the excess overtakes.
the final lines were the hardest to land. what lingered for me was the memory of the first rush—that undeniable brightness, that sense of rescue—even when i knew it was already marked to spoil. the piece ends there, in that tension: trying to acknowledge both the sweetness and the ache, without letting either cancel the other out. i often find myself writing toward that tension—what lingers sweet even as it turns, when intimacy conceals as much as it gives, when closeness deceives as much as it sustains.