Two poems by JT Lauchausse
all lives / matter
Place your coffee in the microwave
and when it beeps, forget it was yours;
turn about the room and ask aloud:
“want me to get that? want me to take care of that?”
option A.
A trout gets stuck between two rocks
and the polar bear approaches, sweetly,
not even on tiptoes, but on its arms, saying:
“some things were always meant to be.”
option B.
A boxing ring, a little boy, a big guy
knocking him clean of teeth, and again,
and when his jaw snaps, the referee yawns:
“wait, what are the rules again?”
Sometimes, the eggs are scrambled, or burnt,
and you watch them burn and burst, entranced
with a spatula at your side, and you wonder:
“is this when I stop? Do I go ahead and stop now?”
option C.
So the tree falls in a forest, alone again,
and one tree turns to the other, sighing
and bristling at the sight, brimming with pity:
“so, who’s gonna be next? Not me, not us.”
option D.
In America, in Atlantis, a bucket of meat
swings above the starved, just out of reach,
and when they jump up, they touch it, and it erupts
into dust, confetti, strips of paper that read: “until next time!”
You’ve got to think of God on the home plate,
helmet of gold, or whatever, and his face is beautiful,
of course, and when he swings, he misses, so he goes:
“sorry, y’all, I got distracted; I suppose these things happen.”
option E.
Sasha takes a gun now; she goes to the hospital
and stands there, doing nothing, and they suddenly believe her
and she suddenly knows what it is to be believed in,
and they all cry out: “Not me! Not this guy! No way!”
option F.
The young people sunbathe in the streets, dead
or almost dead, polar bears doing handstands
all around their corpses, bristling and bemoaning:
“want me to get that? want me to take care of that?”
So the microwave beeps at the end of the world
and God wakes up, beautifully, to the smell of burnt eggs,
to his house of lifeless bodies, to someone’s cup of coffee
of which he takes, drinks, and shrugs off potential feelings.
call of the taker
Donatello fires into the dark,
one crack of a gunshot like
bone break on a pipeline,
same white powder dust rising
as Michelangelo goes down
into a puddle of blood
and betrayal.
“Death is a mutation,” says
Leonardo, hunched turtleback
weepy and remorseful—
could have done something, or
could have been the one.
Somewhere else, Simon says
to Alvin: “I love him,
I love him, I love him!”
on the back of a motorbike
and Theodore wrapped around him
when Alvin raises a barrel
as they roar off beyond
and fires, and then again.
Dora contemplates tomorrow,
in a high and shrill excitement:
“where is Peace hiding?”
JT Lachausse serves as the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Matador Review and is an associate editor at Hotel Amerika. His work has been featured in Foliate Oak and Quail Bell Magazine, and he has work forthcoming in Enizagam, Praxis, and Polaris. Originally from Aurora Sparks, Texas, he now lives in Chicago, where he attends Columbia College for Fiction Writing.
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