“Allegory of the Vanities of the World,” oil on canvas, by Pieter Boel, 1663.
Today I am occupied by the corpses
of the newly dead,
they pour in from the screens
of my laptop and television,
they leap through my eyes
and into my head from newspapers lying
on shelves at the convenience store,
they settle straight to my feet
and it seems there’s always room
for more, I am not overflowing
and they weigh nothing.
My heart can take it.
My heart which can take marriage
and divorce and an American
hamburger with a fried egg on it.
My soul, on the other hand…
my soul, my soul is lost
among so many others
falling like snow,
the silence an ink blot
spreading on a tablecloth
claiming the white for its own.
Kurt Luchs won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up, are published by Sagging Meniscus Press, which will also issue his next full-length poetry collection in 2024, Death Row Row Row Your Boat. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
