Sweet Sun Tea
Photo by Brendan Wanderer’s Collection
02.07.26| Vol. 57, No. 5 | Poetry
Sweet Sun Tea
the floor of the pitcher carries silt
settled along the way while waiting
– glass by glass – to pass through
lips, activate tongues, soothe sore
throats, cool the chest, fill the
belly, as heat pours down from a
young summer sun, excited to shine after
hiding too long behind rain.
pour by pour, a clear jug swirls memories.
brown squares and lemon circles caught
between lopsided cubes melting as rapidly
as images of hands who taught me this art.
drop by drop, debating whether to splash the
last mouthful down the drain, unceremoniously,
or let it linger on the tongue like sandpaper – that
noticeable grit that comes with autumn when
attention turns to winter and one
longs to feel the unsatisfying grains in those
last sips at the bottom of a vessel
that was once filled with sweet sun tea.
about the author
Maeve Slattery
Maeve is a fourth year honours psychology student at VIU where she is a lab coordinator for the Fear & Anxiety Research Lab and a peer-support learning leader. Off-campus, she works as an inclusive education teacher and volunteers at the Nanaimo Brain Injury Society. Prior to attending VIU, she published Celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas (a children’s daily activity book), a stand-alone novel Grafted Together based on her experiences in Zimbabwe, as well as Guarding Damiana, the first book of a YA trilogy that desperately went on hold after she started taking psychology courses. Other projects in the vault include a children’s picture book series and a young reader’s novel series. She is planning to attend graduate studies in clinical psychology, so it looks like those writing projects will be staying in the vault for another 6 years. In the meantime, she continues to write poems, songs, and statistical analyses for research projects.
