Coffee on kentucky avenue
This is the season her mirror thunders
at her
inhibited only by what’s left of his
pension
something in her mouth climbs out
tells her what she should look like,
what she should do
The house throws back its head and
laughs a belch of smoke
its windows blind him in drifts of
shag carpet
his mother’s hands roll biscuits out
of wood-panel clouds
they clear just in time to kick open
the failure of his heart
Her children tell her what she should look
like, what she should do
they fail her heart and disappear into
her mirror
her mirror with its gasp-sharp teeth
Her room is bigger with the TV on
it talks to her with faces that never
sag, never crack
it crawls into her mouth and sits at
the kitchen table where her mother did
Truckin’
He knows about the roads around here
tracing fog on the windshield to sign
his name
to enlist, behind him the creaking
metal trailer
behind him the leaking 38th parallel,
cat-eyed girl
at the gas station in a little red car
smiles at him
behind nerves, citizen band radio
sizzles on the windshield
beating back fragile diamonds, rich
with hours, horns
asphalt smoking in deeper nights
between cities
His children play with monsters
they find bones in the woods
charred by ghost fires that attack
their hearts
His children play monsters
lapping blood from bodies in their
dreams
he hauls their faces state to state
Flying ointment, limited liabilities
Do you want to cool off on the
cemetery lawn?
You would rather wait. You wake up in
the middle of the night feeling what everyone you know feels in that moment,
the middle of that moment. You walk up and down the cold bottom of the lake.
A slow woodpecker tapping the
thickness of a branch above you sounds to me like dead friends still coming to
the door. A face traced with no care in dust.
Do you want to cool down on the
cemetery lawn?
You wake up in the middle of the night
and the sheets are infested with eyes. Eyes closing around you, grinding you to
sleep. They sidewind away.
Do you know who would be up this late,
to watch you wake up in the middle?
I’ll wait. You walk up the cool blue
gone where you watch me wake. You warp the face of the deep until it smiles.
The shape of minnows.
The Black River is empty
The Black River empties into a
cemetery where your urn reminds ashes of wholeness. Its stiff waters green
steel banks patrolled by police officers with furrowed brows and in its depth
one can see the glister of shining minnows blowing like a halo around my dead
friend’s chalked outline. In 1971 you set it on fire.
Father, I said, at one end of Broadway
we lose our names, on the other our bodies are taken from us by black wind.
This is all I can tell you about myself. The Black River is empty.
To hunt, herons compensate for
refraction, swaying, unruly child, with your white bandana declaring how tough
you wish your father had been. He would never look you in the face. What I
hoped to find by crossing it on the trestle was some way to answer the officers
without baring my teeth. Your father’s love toughened those stretches of tight
quiet until every inch of your skin was snapping. In 1981 in the cemetery a
black river lit green light on you as you walked home from school.
I think you know you can’t burn the
river up. The Steel Mill is the cemetery’s night light. Police officers flow
around your white bandana and chalk the borders of your body on the water.
Perhaps a nice nap on the cemetery lawn. Perhaps my open mouth, spilling time.
Explanation
Because it’s a steady pulse and what
skips it
a type of tension-free melted ecstasy
meat weather inside the red felt
restaurant
where they steal music from your stiff
satchel
Because it’s a thready pulp hanging by
the drips
of dear sister’s fracked eulogy for
mother’s feeding tube
which both of us fear
Because it’s a heady pulpit in what
grips us
what cups our bitter fun wasting
closer to
loss which has never lied to us
I remember when you were there
before you were air and pictures
curling
black with an orange heat that makes
cold homes for everyone
Because it’s a ready palm crossed with
dull roads
over which weather considers sisters
of felt
velveteen like liquid nutrition
It’s a dead park on the edge of a pink
city
where we pale in our stalls as our
pulse unwinds
on the lips of diamond-eyed toddlers
who laugh as we crack into ash
The county line
I dream a zany haunted house where my
father drops me
full of beautiful rooms and unwanted
cousins
This in a county where the lawns are
the same green patches
that forget my home Everyone is south here and wants
my attention which is only on the
doors all of which
open to either rooms full of flannel
ghosts or cackling
sunshine In one downstairs room someone has set
a table full with fried chicken mashed
potatoes boats
of gravy with their slick surfaces
reflecting back
all this wood paneling This in a country not my home
This in a house where my father wasn’t
lost
but instead spreads out in a cacophony
of others
jovial enough I’m laughing at each new face each
with a joke and welcoming smile while
I try
every door When one opens to an untroubled sky
tears invade my eyes and I know at
last that
I want my mother
Lewis LaCook - As a child, on
interstate trips, Lewis LaCook thought the moon was following his family’s
Econoline van. Upon reaching adulthood, he couldn’t tell whether the truth
disappointed or relieved him, so he started writing things down. Some of these
things looked like poems, and they may have appeared in journals like Lost
And Found Times, Otoliths,Unlikely Stories, Whiskey Tit, Lotus-eater,
Synchronized Chaos and Slope, among others. In 2012 BlazeVOX published
Beyond the Bother of Sunlight, a book-length collaboration with Sheila
E. Murphy; previously, Anabasis published his book-length poem Cling.
His collection My Kinship with the Lotus-eaters was published in 2022 by
BlazeVOX.(http://wp.blazevox.org/product/my-kinship-with-the-lotus-eaters-by-lewis-lacook/) Lewis can often be
found wandering the wilds of Western New York state with his wife Lindsay.
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