Lewis LaCook


We are waiting for the beloved in a starless country

Flowers are born in our mouths and expanding
from here out to the pit where we toss the hours
off the edge of  how I sleep through your kindness
(There is no other way through with these lips
foul with words lacing the product of all this
ticking and swaying and with these hands
describe the ends of gestures with the ends of
your kindness) Asleep at last

threading the room’s air through the eyes
that see the room and see you too
with my tongue in your breath in such
salt sweat until I’m clean for you (I am
ever preparing for your arrival and wear 
the color of metal for my eyes until I cross
over into the country where stars fall
and this is your kindness right here
it is the real world) Isn’t this enough

to get across to you that if you look over
your shoulder the door will close
and half the time you’re trapped here with me



Principles

High wind warnings tide you over
rare ice in the broken finger on mud
(You’ll just change your shoes

on the pulse of the country sputtering
names far out on a green slit in the lake)
with nothing to drink

but rabbit’s tongue peekaboo 
for scurrying past landmarks with teeth
printed time-wise holes (In your hometown
the trees have been abstracted by shells

flute-flint bite marks lace the leaves
together with memory) amended

That these principles self-soothe
is the whole of human unless
at this same address in the morning

a tea pot (Tipping over
spill tustles stunt pines

O scrub

fail us with seizures)



Chasing rabbit

A jet trail rainbows melon curves
chasing rabbit over elevated drifts

packed in ice (still they paw crazed heat
in wide soft toes that curl around choking light
with which to watch) reactors crater the entrance

to contemplative shelves of mushroom flaking off
when the breeze eats them and they brace

(Without these dead trees they would not
be a people but in their mouths)
charcoal sketched like wreckage

of last year’s nests in branches bent
down by ice (But patched now with
dull greetings blunt grass thaw out of

their people) their hands stung cold on their lips
like a flint of vapor catching yolk light

snuffed on (alarms across the village’s deaf trees
among which a rabbit farms in roots
a kindness of ice to grub prints of boots)

They chase the snapped off
people to borders of reactors



A nap in long rust

According to the pile-on nothing’s moved in the woods
the gag of veins pulled up by brackish noon
quick quiet snapping the wind shut over our heads

Cold wood quit long ago smells like burning
enormous pucker rusted like twins 

When you woke up you said the snow was beautiful
but we can’t expect spring
being as we are

There is a weary saturation in a pane in the mail
and when you open it white flowers drift

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. Lewis can often be found wandering the wilds of Western New York state with his wife Lindsay.

 
 

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