Bob Lucky


On Destiny
           i.m. Charles Simic

When I was young, my parents ran away from home after selling me to a travelling circus. For years I scooped elephant poop before working my way up to lion tamer. Sometimes I would see my parents in the audience clapping wildly after the lion released my head with an exaggerated yawn. When I cracked the whip above his head, he would take a few swats at me with his chunky paws. We were both bored, but not to death.



A Poet's Lament

          (based on Samuel Johnson’s A Preface to the English Language)



On Pastoral Dreams

We have ants in our city apartment. When we return after a time in the country, the apartment is ant-free for a day or two, but word gets out that we’re back and we wake up one morning to a line of ants making their way from the terrace to the kitchen. My wife’s not adverse to squashing them or drowning them, but insecticide is out. She uses a natural deterrent that makes the entire apartment smell like a cinnamon roll gone bad. The result is that the ants don’t die but reroute themselves, regroup in another crack in the floor. This morning we found them having a convention inside the dishwasher. I suggested to my wife that we move permanently to the country, but there’s no guarantee the ants won’t find us, and now she suspects that I’m in cahoots with them.



A Perfect Mistake

          (based on Gertrude Stein’s “Rooms” in Tender Buttons)



On Familiarity

We’ve been married a long time, and now like people and their pets, we’ve come to resemble one another — thinning hair, hair where you don’t want or need it, sagging jowls, and wrinkles that may be the only thing holding our eyes in place. When we go to dinner, we order the same dishes. We go to bed at the same time. Recently I picked up my wife’s arrhythmia. Now we don’t know if we’re madly in love or having heart attacks.



On Coffee and the Clarity it Brings

This morning while having a chat over coffee, my wife and I noticed that it was getting harder to hear one another, harder to see one another. Our life was one of increasing static, both aural and visual. “Who are you?” I shouted. “Where are you?” she shouted back. She got up to get more coffee and stopped at the kitchen window. “Come here. Look at the dandelions,” she said. I joined her at the window and we stared at the dandelions for a long time. “I remember you,” I said. “Is there any more coffee?”



Red Hour

          (based on Gertrude Stein’s “Glazed Glitter” in Tender Buttons)



Preface to Canto II of The Three Virgins of Rosenberg, Texas

In the second canto the poet strives to describe the beauty of the virgins, but since he has yet to see them, he must rely on the townspeople, most of whom he suspects have never seen a virgin and are relying on the descriptions of yet others who have never seen them. It’s fantasy all the way down, but he manages to wring a vision from the hearsay. “Monster trucks sailing through a floodlit sky, / the virgins defy gravity, they fly” and “A virgin is like a rodeo queen / who’s never tasted a cowboy’s dusty jeans” are two of the more popular images.

my window
is always open
summer
watching the curtain
wrestle the breeze




Bob Lucky is the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), and My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019). His work has appeared in Rattle, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Otoliths, Die Leere Mitte, and other journals. He lives in Portugal.

 
 

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