Four Poems

Good Friday in Bucktown

my usual response to life’s vicissitudes is to clutch my heart and cry “Elizabeth–it’s the big one” there must be a better way no good deed goes unpunished is something my father likes to say also your serious poem will not save you today is a good day because i can still call you and maybe you have factoids to make my hands stop shaking like skinny trees something about an otter and a stone how plants talk to each other how God one time dressed as a criminal to seem a little less scary



Ask twenty-year-old Justin who is drinking beer at eight o’clock in the morning and watching Tim Burton’s Batman

it costs nothing to call codeine Mr. Codeine like Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys or to think of a poem as a treasure box or wind up machine let me be your little dog till your big dog comes is a verse that works harder than a fake i.d. poems about poetry are usually better than songs about being in a band i forgive myself for not being famous like i forgive everyone who broke my heart particularly Sara R. it’s better to have a song with pirates and convicts a photo of you in a cowgirl hat with no bra the age to learn guitar or a language is coming to an end it makes me a little sad the tunnel gets narrower but still there’s a light albeit at the end like a slow song with no one to dance with like i feel a little cheated when Shaun’s rainbow colored cigarettes don’t make rainbow colored smoke



On returning from the bathroom i’m told my ride left with the man in a jester hat to go find “drugs”

William Burroughs says you have to take a broad general view of things but i think he was being sarcastic and what i need now is the love of a woman once kicked out of boarding school but also out of a Misfits concert i feel i could be an anchor for her like no other i believe in the littlest birds not in the abstract but perched on the one tree i own their power to sing in the darkness i had a teacher who climbed into Marilyn Monroe’s lap as a boy so i’m thinking this is a world where beauty comes undeserved for example i don’t deserve this balcony with its view of the old mint and the stars beyond or even the man on Esplanade whistling for his friend or his dog Kevin Kevin the dog



Poem for Kate

in my grandparents day for entertainment they’d hold these things called “womanless weddings” where one man would put on a dress and “marry” another man i offer this to you as a potential topic for your doctoral thesis for although i am not done with school school is done with me but it’s going to cost you remember our late night conversations Bonhoeffer on cheap grace and expensive grace how we swore we’d never settle for cheap grace how you said nature was your cathedral picture me holy saturday at the ER bent in half and bargaining for painkillers this may be the beginning of real prayer and just as i’ve cobbled together my masculinity out of a love of football and a hatred of liturgical dance there’s a lot of frontier for you i don’t think of you as muse or madwoman so much as not the wind but maybe the trees that stand up to the wind

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Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans, LA and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His first book, A Reading from the Book of Panic, is available from Lavender Ink.