justin lacour
Burr-Rose
All the guys at the batting cage
crush on you, but my crush
will pound their crushes to dander.
For mine is the superior crush:
I sit behind the levee,
dry swallowing yellow jackets,
thinking only of your face,
as if your face was an a-b-a-b poem,
a beauty walks the night poem.
My own poems are not good poems.
You once said “Some food exists just
to bring condiments to your lips.”
That’s my poems. They’re just here
to say how lovely your eyes, how lovely
your fingers lowering the blinds.
I want to give you flowers, not
like a boyfriend gives flowers,
but how William Burroughs
would, where the flowers look
deranged & a little dirty.
I want to put these flowers on
your kitchen table, so you
can see them, fresh in the morning sun,
all these transgressive beauties.
The Rosary
I’m relieved when Jesus leaves
and the mysteries are over.
I don’t like prayer as much as I like
the white bird that glides over commuter traffic
or music from the door of a party.
But tell me about the nights where
God is not an abstraction,
the love that feels nothing,
but keeps talking anyway.
Insomniac
When I can’t sleep, I play
this game where I make dioramas
of Shakespeare plays out of beer cans,
e.g., Othello--two beer cans lying
down dead, all the other beer cans gathered
around in mourning; Hamlet--
I knock down all the beer cans,
except the beer cans that are
supposed to be Horatio and Fortinbras.
Some internet person once said Romeo
& Juliet is the story of how two
horny teenagers caused the deaths
of six people. I wonder at this person’s
concept of love; it’s probably not
the hulking child I carry
on my back, insisting Love is
inconvenient; love plans badly.
Its arms wrapped around my neck,
refusing to let go.
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry.