Baby’s
First Lie
She slaps in anger,
wanting or not wanting something—
who knows what?—
and then seeing her mother’s look
feigns gentleness, the slap becoming
a friendly pat,
but the eyes still impudent
and a crooked smile forming
in spite of herself.
And all this before the first word.
Tabula Rasa
Again, I was struggling
to find a few well-chosen words
that might reveal the music
of the mundane, the song
the world hums under its breath
that could begin to make
sense of it all.
Again, I failed.
I thought I heard the hum
swell, draw near and stop,
then moments later felt
the tiny sting of the mosquito
on my forehead as it drank
a drop of my brain blood.
My hand moved faster
than my mind or the mosquito,
splashing my blood and his body
on the blank page,
and what it wrote
was for my eyes only.
What Borges Said
Argentina’s greatest export, the
maker
of fables disguised as essays
and poems disguised as translations,
was on a lecture tour
of the United States, already blind,
led around by Willis Barnstone
and other good friends.
I saw him at Northwestern University
but he never saw me,
and when my turn came
to ask him a question
all reason left me and I blurted out,
“What do you think of H. P. Lovecraft?”
He smiled and said,
“Wonderful imagination.
Terrible writer. But when a man
has a name like Lovecraft
he has already given us everything.
We need ask nothing more of him.”
Robin
I remember how your lips tasted
on the school bus, Robin, like jam
from some unknown berry, how quickly
they parted and opened for me,
promising other openings, but also
other partings, and I
never even knew your last name.
I can still see the sun on your face
and in your wide blue eyes
that stayed open the whole time,
the ember of memory still glows,
and now it also burns, a sweet stinging
fire that never quite consumes itself.
Nonbeing
Now, I am.
Soon, I will not be.
I’ve spent my whole life
scrabbling just to live
even as death was growing in me
like the bee’s honeycomb.
I’m late to the wake
and I bring nothing to it
but wide-eyed wonder,
yet still, with the philosophers
and mystics, I find sweetness
in seeking to know
the mystery of nonexistence,
the secret of nonbeing,
such a vastness compared
to my brief time on earth.
Will it be an unravelling,
a dissolving into nothingness,
or an entwining into everything
minus the personal?
From here it appears
the personal is all there is,
all that matters anyway.
Some say death is part of life.
I say life is part of death;
death is so much bigger
and lasts so much longer.
I’d surrender my sword to it
except that the sword
was never mine and I was born
with it dangling over me
by a single invisible thread.
Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) has poems published in Plume Poetry Journal, The Sun Magazine, and London Grip. He won the 2022 Pushcart Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Portage, Michigan.
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