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POETRY

Lent

How much longer Lord
until i can sit on the couch
with a box of fiddle faddle
and watch gilmore girls

i think “Chevy Van” 
might be a Christian song
if the people making love
in said chevy van are married

see what i did there

i’m trying to smooth things over
it’s one thing to be eighteen
pretending your oldsmobile
is a sherman tank

but i’m nearly fifty Lord

if i give up booze and pills 
my fascination with whatever
i think i lack will i love You
much more than myself

i don’t really love myself

but i keep my monster fed

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This is it

In the past we took a fool around and find out attitude
towards mystery

but just like the Grateful Dead had two drummers
in case one fell asleep

we have canaries with a hundred thousand songs
for dark roads

we have a child who will climb on the roof
to talk to the moon

on our behalf and there are worse things than being
terrified and bored

but to be a little less scared would be up there
with feeding

the five thousand or the woman caught in the very act
of adultery though 

this is the life we were begging for when we kept asking
for anything else

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Lundi Gras, 4:52 a.m.

“Lundi Gras, 4:52 a.m.” read by Justin Lacour.

In Chapter Eight of the Gospel of John Jesus bends down and begins to write in the dirt with His finger the evangelist doesn’t say what Jesus wrote though scholarship says Jesus was writing out the sins of the elders who wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery i strongly disagree with this scholarship though i have no scholarship of my own

i think i will have to work hard today the sun isn’t even out yet but i know there will be no time to watch Dobie Gillis or read long poems though most poems are too long the old poet told me 

during my second senior year i served as designated driver for the old poet and we travelled this great state for poetry and drinks and once after the legitimate bars closed he grabbed my head and tried to transfer a smidge of his talent as he told me about Robert Lowell’s eyes 

i’m so scared of writing treacle i think that’d be a type of suffering and suffering terrifies me though i know it’s coming like i know the rest of the country will have jet packs and New Orleans will still have the streetcar St. Francis de Sales says to meditate on how people will still be out partying

while you’re on your deathbed so i meditate in the silence before kids wake up how i’m one day closer to the cross whatever cross is laid out for me i know it’s made with the same love that opened my eyes for the moment of my birth when i saw a new earth and i was held by the light the air and every unknown word

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Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His first full-length collection, A Season in Heck & Other Poems, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.

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