Uncollected love letter (advanced taxidermy)
Uncollected love letter (postpartum)
Uncollected love letter (treatise)
Uncollected love letter (Polyphemus)
Uncollected love letter (campaign)
Uncollected love letter (art)
Uncollected love letter (backyard)
Uncollected love letter (fan mail)
Uncollected love letter (soft power)
Uncollected love letter (anniversary)
The war years
Uncollected love letter (advanced taxidermy)
You say women need to sleep more at night because they use their brains more during the day there are studies you say and i say we should listen to the studies i want to trust all my good ideas though some seem eerily posthypnotic like my decision to follow you climbing up the tree of knowledge of good and evil walking barefoot along the branches while the children sleep we are balancing mid air the moon close and swollen if i am made of dust and you are made of my bone you know how i think how i’ll stare and stare at you your hands yes even your hands so you control how beauty fires my eyes and i want the branches of this tree to bend down to earth to lead us to the house where i relax when you say relax and your hands sew animals and their ghosts back together
Uncollected love letter (postpartum)
The baby comes and you join groups like the Hip Stroller Mammas i never seek the company of others dads it says something it says your sadness is wiser than mine and you sit on the floor with two three other women holding hands to levitate out of one moment and land in another i try to keep up but don't understand so you tell me to sit still you tell me to count the raindrops as they fall then count them backwards
Uncollected love letter (treatise)
So after your night shift standing up for hours just one time i massage your feet as you lean back on the bed stoned and doom scrolling like i’m not there on my knees and i feel the sensual burn of your indifference which is its own type of power more powerful than your gratitude like when Penelope made even lovelier by Athena’s magic makes the suitors go out and bring her gold and jewels as an offering not because she wanted their gifts but because she could being angry and a little bored like you and like you beautiful as those willows their branches dangling in the breeze
Uncollected love letter (Polyphemus)
In your epic the men bored between meals bored of discus and cornhole pick a fight with a cyclops who breaks skull after skull till the men run down the beach screaming back to their ship leaving the women on the beach the women now in charge of what the men left behind the women fasten their sandals and walk into the cave of monsters the women accustomed to monsters
Uncollected love letter (campaign)
In your epic the men stand still as stone on the beach staring at the waves moving back and forth back and forth till they need the women to wake them up tell them to move hands and feet again you say this sitting in our backyard crepe myrtle blossoms drop in the kiddie pool white petals on the water at dusk and now you say the women are trying to preserve tragedy each woman memorizes a story to pass down hoping it will reach us as we kneel to pick wild strawberries from the grass and out in America your hypothetical candidate takes the stage to applause she raises her fist against flower hunters robots that eat anything before she praises the moon and what the trees are doing
Right now your hypothetical candidate she walks through flood water the same flood that carried us from the city to this garden overgrown vines and packs of stray dogs in the distance we put down our canteens and hold hands we need to talk about the flood but also art you suggest Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son as a neck tattoo though you say art can also be a woman talking about whatever she wants she charges men to listen and buys a house of her own with their money while i say van Gogh’s sunflowers look almost sentient and thus diabolic but i did not come this far with you to be a theater for panic attacks the dogs begin to snore and we walk with flashlights heat lightning and nightjars we walk and tall grass brushes our thighs like lovers the wind cries for us like children
Uncollected love letter (backyard)
You want to help me you have instructions a countdown you want me to walk in your impossible backyard notice how green the grass is first the sunlight hot on the back of my neck you want me to dig dig dig in the dirt with my hands to find old bottles plate shards pieces of a stove keep them as a currency we trade between us you want me to stay till there’s only bioluminescence and your voice telling me to watch the pretty lights watch them go out one by one it’s so late when they finish when i close my eyes you say good as in good job
Uncollected love letter (fan mail)
i’m sorry i underestimate you you’re totally in charge of a small bell ringing i come inside sweat stained and there’s dishes in the sink to wash towels in the dryer to fold you say “think of a dazzling koi who instead of granting wishes whispers orders for you there is no outthinking the koi” you say “the koi can swim anywhere even in your eyes” yes i say i can see its scales shining right now my head droops my arms heavy and useless till it passes out of the room you have authority but also vulnerability look at you cutting your own hair or soaking in the bath till even your fingers become wrinkled and complex as little brains
Uncollected love letter (soft power)
So let’s go ahead and cut a mouth in my heart so it can eat all the light shooting out of your heart and my heart will grow big sometimes you stroke the cro magnon lobes of my brain just by your gold tooth a t shirt that shows off your belly and you persuade me out into the end of summer
Uncollected love letter (anniversary)
It’s obvious the women in your epic use masks to create a world not hide from the world but i’ll say so anyway so we can have a baseline understanding i don’t want to lose you to a trustafarian you make a mask of your own out of papier mache and gold paint and feathers a third eye at the center is potent like a spell calling for hair and menstrual blood is supposed to be potent the mask i wear while writing this is just a paper plate but it helps me say again i want to press my lips to your ears neck and lay beside you still broken by your art still astonished your body makes room for mine
The little Medusa that lived on my shelf i didn’t ask but she said “Men are so easy to turn to stone just smile through all their bullshit while thinking of a bird flying higher than a bullet” i was working two jobs sleeping on a blue recliner between shifts out on my own for the first time living on cigarettes Medusa went topless her nipples the color of dried blood sometimes in the middle of the night after my last shift and the bars closed i’d talk to her explain the books i read on my lunch break explain the election explain the war as if it was over rather than in its third act one time i was careless and looked directly into her eyes then i felt my body turn hard and every thought i had crash against my skull my mouth frozen in mid sentence and that’s how we lived for a long time the sunlight coming and going the smoke thinning in the air the war kept going without me the war hammered to the faintest whisper so she could talk over the war talk talk talk and although i was stone i heard her brain pulse for the first time not her regular brain the one she kept hidden from me its dark and compelling muscles and somehow i got well
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children, and edits Trampoline. He is the author of five chapbooks of poems and his first full-length collection, A Season in Heck & Other Poems, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.
