Lewis LaCook


Something

Something that moves through the universe liquid silver lightning quick to quiet you in the fur of your pillow by cactus light they bend over laced or furrowed ice notes a baby’s first teeth they pluck soft wood tuck the door in sand through flute lungs chips root against your legs something spending terse gilled molt like italic chirps thin point to nap behind your freckled lids calming hormone both sexes oil from around dark quilts organ with your legs hill fell away are so round so they enamor plentitude scabbed states heating oil their heads too heavy to move through your face is foreign but oh implied violence in spirituals sign gut perturbation grasped air your shoulders to like grape parentheses um keep shape of combustion stairway to fairy lights to oh something a finger they up iced hill armory black belching out leaded clad tartan wooden tort you with eye-edge smiles illegible until they daub in their heads cipher of living water suite comment out her new life of barely existing to manifest pescatarian omega out their throat be difficult just the appearance of their headlights ground into hillside from a pole by the road to a pole on your house could gently and means something they leave as the sun goes down and won’t look at you shiny throat stub fifty oscillator voice scaping their finger slurped milk down around on to entrap plastic in their blood oath swallowed percussive curve syrups you vaporize in aerosols ah slurred dead plums for not eating a thing they offered you in the underworld overall but authenticate triumvirate against vertebrates as means to um reply so you catch them in wet metal tame floor stamen alike trade them stars lick sodium hot brawl edge-eyes your fast silence universe is something



Some time

The fan kicks on, hustling air from the room, but the room retains its shape. First sip of coffee is sweet and so is the second then a window brimming snow apologizes for sky both aquamarine and salmon. Problem is becoming convinced there is enough. The fan kicks coffee, spends hours on fatalistic shirts but the room complies with cobwebs, brooding winter until it’s hatched. Will artificial orchids suffice? Hexagon, pane, warm dearth, plastic lawn chair mantled in fists of snow. In the end people walk off, the fans kick off, the room rains dust in stunned dormancy, but orchids retrain to sour sun, conversations lag, and shape with conviction is enough. A victim is called for. Enthusiastic tang, eulogy on boundaries, vape juice, the pursuits of desiccated spiders long dim.

You can tell people to walk off their victims but air games sweetness and you have to swallow some time.

The house floats atop

The house floats atop
Churn like the sea, curled with sediment
Holding his belly with a wide open mouth

When she shows him her skin
About the inebriants on hand
To breathe oxygen instead

Darling, I can see the flashing button through my thumb
Suet warmed by rain, listen to us

He thinks it’s a phase
Milky morning light and behind her eyes
Blacktop freckled with blue-blotch ice

Lewis LaCook creates texts, some more narrative than lyrical, some more than uncalled for. His work has percolated beneath the surface for a while, and he collaborated with Sheila E. Murphy on a book-length poem called Beyond The Bother of Sunlight, published by BlazeVOX some time ago. He has written one novel, unpublished, and is in the throes of a first draft of another.

 
 

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