Dear nuncle,
It could be worse i no longer have the pirate queen fantasy and the woman i met at the raw bar she had much to say about the luzhin defense as the sun rose she took my knight then my bishop how i wish this was code for something and things were coming together merrily like an ancient hokum song instead i’m walking home through fog and kudzu i’m going to fail ethics take an incomplete in myth & folklore my parents have given up on me this is not year to go backpacking down the highway of shallow graves a house dress hanging on a tree branch could be a sign of much worse the flag of an invisible kleptocracy so i set phasers for fun out on the quad they’ve started an ersatz fight club i say ersatz since they use boxing gloves instead of their fists but still women are unimpressed except by Angry Sex John and that dick weed off campus who makes his own beer
Connecticut
O sister have you ever watched two people you find annoying individually hit on each other it’s a vortex i alone have escaped to tell you their names were Kristen and Kyle and this was in the mail room where i spent all summer putting together boxes to ship instructional booklets to cpas and river pilots and there was that guy really into Skinny Puppy the guy who only wanted to talk about suspension there was nothing special about me except body dysmorphia and the loneliness that made me drive across state lines hoping Connecticut didn’t keep beer behind crime scene tape on Sundays like they did in Massachusetts and then i just kept driving west in Farmington i saw a deer carcass bloated in the road followed by Miss Porter’s School for Girls maybe they need an english teacher i thought or a janitor i’m qualified to do either though not both and one time i swear i heard a middle aged woman say to another middle aged woman “I’m about to bark my tits off” but not in Connecticut where there were stone fences and money and a pasture behind the mobil station where i stopped for a cigarette and saw a newborn horse take its first hesitant steps on spindly legs i’d never been around horses and now the baby was hobbling towards me like some rare forgiveness as out came two maybe three stars
Poem for the office manager playing Steely Dan all morning then mixing it up with “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)”
When i dream i dream to Edison Lighthouse and Paper Lace at my other job the edgiest thing they play is The Archies though one time they played “I Remember” by Madonna and i had to think was that from Don Juan Demarco or With Honors the 1994 film where Joe Pesci plays an unhoused man who lays some serious wisdom on the Harvard kids and there’s not a lot of nice things you can say about me but i’m largely immune to Audrey Hepburn’s charms i’ll probably just take a muscle relaxer and watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance again i respect its message you do all manner of good things but people will only remember something you didn’t do how many apartments did i enter in the aughts with Breakfast at Tiffany’s posters and nothing for Veronica Lake i admit i’m self-centered a bit of a popinjay my winsome lover is in the shower singing but it’s They Might Be Giants natch why not Pinetop Perkins it makes me want to bolt leave my home and all things familiar for some scuzzy tenderloin where the songs are mean but deign to punch me in the face till I reach heaven
The fucked-up camping trip
i struggle to make conversation with the other dads in cub scouts maybe we should form a prog rock band Maria Callous then the moms would come and take away our loneliness as in days gone by tell them about the dream how every night i battle Edward Longshanks one night i even got to kill him a rapier through his black heart and when i lived with the woman from Los Angeles sometimes in the evening she’d look up from her knitting and say things like “Tom Waits’s kids are really badly behaved” and you know life was my MFA but also UMass i miss it up there what the leaves did in October how i could walk the woods and pretend this was all a variation on the fisher king that someone was coming to heal my troubled groin and make the land fruitful again and i hate the phrase “plus one” for i was without a plus one all through the swing craze and the craze that followed which had something to do with big sunglasses
Speed dating
Among the brothers that taught at my Catholic school was “Brother Holiday” who was called “Brother Holiday” because he was old and we assumed we’d get the day off of school when he died the first of many mistakes of my youth there were years years i was scared to leave my house though one night i worked up the courage to go downtown and see Robert Creeley read a few months before he died please note i did not say “Bob Creeley” because i’m not a douche and learned readings are not like concerts poets do not play their greatest hits they just want to read new stuff so people can say the old was better but the poet has already left them behind and i wanted to be a poet but young forever so i wouldn’t have to say winter words and i never amounted to anything though every year i get braver exhibit A this little dog i made out of twist ties that has finally made you smile
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline.