and I can hardly refuse. I know you’ll carry me down to the Rouge when I’ve grown too frail to walk but still need to watch a river spill over rocks. I hear the old prose unroll, laughing and babbling as it descends from some mythic Irish wood to crack its consonants against those […]
Michael Lauchlan
Michael Lauchlan’s poems have landed in many publications including Sisyphus, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Rappahannock Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Ninth Letter, Harpur Palate, Cumberland River Review, Bellingham Review, Lake Effect, Briar Cliff, and Poetry Ireland. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from WSU Press. His next collection is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.
The Detained Children of 2019
Imagine a big town of only kids, sixty nine thousand five hundred and fifty the older ones lugging toddlers, all of them improvising games in streets devoid of cars. Released, they could have shed space blankets and spread through neighborhoods to form four thousand soccer teams, watched by hundreds too small to play. They […]
Damages
Younger, I hauled shingles up ladders, flopped them onto roof jacks,scampered to nail down tabs, straddled the peaks and thoughtonly that the view was goodand days were short. Now, I patch my wind-torn roof working slowly and watching footholds. Rather than space, I stare into a concatenation of breaths and heartbeats, a made and counted […]
Shelter
…it is only the light/that we keep feeling a need to account for W.S. Merwin, “The Marfa Lights” A forgotten goddess spits her rage at our doors. Again, it’s snowing. We’ve begun, around the room, to unroll tales of luck no one begs from dice. A tall girl with purple hair has folded into a […]
Blackboards
This poem began in the sudden return of a very old memory. You don’t see them much anymore. Mostly schools have gone dry erase and smart board and flipped classes, but maybe one slate hangs in a gone classroom, where a gone prof, young and powerful, smoking in a window leapt down and began writing, […]