Divine Regret
Fine Print
Shagging Flyballs
Mention My Name for the Discount
The Morning News
A Wake
Homo homini lupus: Man is a wolf to man.
My apes have gone off course,
though their missiles can thread a window.
I didn’t expect them to evolve this way,
swelling the oceans like I did once.
Their missiles assassinate through windows.
Their neutron bombs preserve Picassos.
They scum the swelling oceans with plastic.
Not so great apes—more sap than sapiens.
Their bombs are masterpieces of negation.
Why did I give them opposable thumbs?
Apes, great at decapitation, wise-guy hits.
Better that they had stayed in the trees.
So many innocents under their thumbs.
Homo homini lupus? Homo homini simiae.
Better that they had stayed in the trees
than come down to pave the savanna.
The wolves are praying for my apes
to form one gigantic pack, no outcasts,
and save the last savannas
for doleful wildebeests, dismayed lions.
Can the bipeds sign a pact for life?
I didn’t expect them to evolve this way,
with nothing to teach the wildebeests and lions.
My apes are lost on the golf course.
I’ve known thin ice, loose boards,
unraveling rope,
like the trumpeting credo on
a page of scripture
with a worm of a footnote crawling
at the bottom:
“The meaning of the Hebrew
is uncertain.”
How many mystics
have found themselves
at the exact spot,
in center, to receive,
with upraised hand,
a heavenly body
making its descent,
and felt the hard
smack of union?
But oh, those sprints
to the right place
in the first place--
lungs burning,
heart exploding.
Mention My Name for the Discount
Our main A.M. station sounds faraway,
the voices of the drive-time hosts
cloudy and makeshift, like a bad
recording of a bad recording.
They’re talking about panhandlers
who work the highway entrances,
the sadness of it all, and the fear
they may carjack instead of beg.
My ears are pricked when one host
breaks off to shill for a company
that builds patios, her spiel
chatty and confidential, as if she’s
a hitchhiker in the passenger seat
who’s sharing affordable bliss.
The radio keeps coughing up static,
and I want to cough it up too.
My backyard flowers committed no crimes
last night. Begonia, foxglove, sweet william—
they’re innocent. Did gunshots in the dark
shake their blooms? If so, they’re holding
their ground. The red and yellow columbine
hang their heads. Their roots must know
what’s buried, starting with Abel and up
to the hopeless teens who spray the streets.
Maybe the columbine hear the bad news
through the rootwork from funeral wreaths
before they’re clipped off and heaped
on gleaming caskets to honor the bullet-ridden.
I rub a gnarled mint leaf with my thumb
and sniff it. The scent never lasts.
The son, husband, father, grandfather,
uncle, brother and friend to many
holds still for eternity’s camera, eyes
mashed shut by the supernova flash.
Images on a big screen automate
memory: baseball cap, wedding suit,
bass boat, oxygen tank. Other faces
flashing by match those roaming the aisles,
clustering, scattering, catching up
on retirements, stents, tomato patches,
grandkids. Little boys and girls romp
in the hall, hiding and seeking, their future
all cherries and apples. Laughter
everywhere, bleeding freely as it should.
The saddest person in the funeral home,
its director, in his cramped paneled office,
whose hangdog face suggests he’s waiting
for us to leave so he won’t miss his favorite
show at nine. But then, he’s witnessed
generations of grief, lovefests, truces
between sisters, bodies like this one,
when they stood around other caskets.
He knows the backstories, who cheats,
and everyone knows he drinks on the job.
It’s a small rural town, dying, shunned
by its high school grads and McDonalds.
Does he frown because there isn’t enough
dying to stay open? I hate meeting his eyes.
Robert Lowes is a writer whose poetry has appeared in The New Republic, December, Tampa Review, Big Muddy, The American Journal of Poetry, The Christian Century, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and other publications. An Honest Hunger is his first book of poetry. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He has coordinated the annual high school poetry contest of the St. Louis Poetry Center since 2013. In this role, he has recruited judges such as Naomi Shihab Nye and Jericho Brown, screened entries, and shook hands with the winners at award ceremonies.
A veteran journalist, he has covered the healthcare industry for more than 30 years, mostly notably as a staff writer for Medscape Medical News and Medical Economics. On this sprawling beat, he has written extensively on healthcare reform, electronic health records, malpractice litigation, physician-assisted death, pharmaceuticals, medical education, infectious diseases like Zika and Ebola, Medicare fraud, and the opioid abuse epidemic. As an independent journalist, he has investigated white supremacist groups, profiled university presidents and newspaper publishers, and detailed the lives of career waiters.
He lives with his wife Saundra in University City, Missouri.
