Poetry Feature – Justin Lacour – FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art

Poet’s Statement

“I’m not a scholar; I’m just your average grunt, so what follows may be embarrassingly basic or flat-out wrong. These are non-rhymed/non-metered sonnets (or “fake” sonnets) I wrote in the spring and summer of 2020. The debts are obvious. There’s Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems, and of course, John Berryman’s sonnets written “For an excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv.” Both sequences are inspirations in spirit if not in form. So, what’s going on? I set out to write poems of “passionate folly” (April Bernard’s term). I wanted to write something believing there was a specific person waiting on the other end. I hoped the poem would be a space, not just for the airing of intimate feelings, but a space for intimacy itself. I wanted to make a warm, surreal, funny place for two people to meet in this most unromantic time. This is one of my most fundamental (and embarrassing) hopes for poetry. As Peter Gizzi wrote, “my smile is becoming a page/–becoming an adventure.”

Sonnet (September song)

Let no evil befall you this feast of Johnny
Cash’s death day, for you are like the heat
left at the end of a party, narcotic and free.
If you lived a little closer, we could hurl
lawn darts, share cigarettes like we used to.
Instead, I’m on my second pumpkin stout,
regretting that someone got to you after-me-
but-before-I-was-ready-for-you. I don’t
know how I’ll be judged for these thoughts,
for I believe there’s a God that’s so disappointed
with me, as part of the price of loving me.
But my feelings are not entirely romantic. Part of me
wants to talk to you about the music I’ve heard
blowing in the trees, which is to say, I want more.

Sonnet (Mudflaps)

All along the deadpan corridors of I-10W, I thought of you,
the way your eyes hide behind glasses. Dude in front of me
in the “I BUY RV’S” pickup, naked women silhouettes
on his mudflaps. You’d never be so painfully de rigueur.
I wonder what’s on your (hypothetical) mudflaps.
Maybe Plato’s Cave? I got your message at 8:59.
There are marxist-feminist threads in certain murder
ballads, including but not limited to “Banks of
the Ohio” and “Pretty Polly.” Call to discuss.
But I kept listening to Steel Pole Bathtub.
I don’t want to seem too eager. I’m afraid to
show my hand, afraid you’d know
every message you send is a blossom
of electricity in the middle of a dark house.

Sonnet (a mist of summer kisses where I tried to double-park)^{^[1]}

You wrote something today that made
me think we could never live in the same room,
and maybe that’s the point: we live in each
other’s penumbras, not at each other’s throats.
If you really knew me, you’d shun me.
I show up with religion, my quiet & mangled Christ.
My politics are terrible in a different way than
your politics are terrible (both crush people w/o even noticing).
But I want you to want me in spite
of myself, just as I want you as you are, unchanged by
strange voices & tiny hours, just as I hope
the bars never reopen so one day we can drink
drinks together in this forest where I’ve lived as a
specter, you, a rum & coffee, me a vodka & grape soda.

Sonnet (‘night)

You say we’re old now, w/children
and crow’s feet, but I say your face
deserves a saga written w/perfume & fire,
a saga of stars raining down on the
tin roofs of work and TV and bed.
Sometimes, I think of you, I forget to
speak or blink; I start to believe time
is shaped like a bowl, gently sliding us
back to where we started. May you
sleep tonight on a pillow the size
of a whale while dogs fight in the street,
norteño accordion riffs waft mysteriously
from a passing truck, & clouds and clouds
of moths fly by with eyes on their wings.

Sonnet (Mirrorball)

I can’t be a good man and want you.
I want to be a good man, but I also
want a party where the mirrorball
drops and rolls out the door, gathering
mud and leaves and twigs, as it blazes
a new path through lawns and forest;
a party where boys shotgun cans
of Schaefer, while you say brilliant things
like “The difference between a violin and
a fiddle is you can spill beer on a fiddle.”
You have a cigarette holder and a corsage
on your wrist, a glass of something sparkling.
There’s a fire in the fireplace. Well-intentioned idiots
clear the floor, so we can dance, but never touch.

Sonnet (What happened to tonight?)

I wanted to talk, but the night got away.
I listened to the same sad sack song
over and over b/c it shares your name.
The singer claims he’s wasted, but on what?
Mike’s Hard Lemonade or some other malternative,
most likely. Nothing that would help me walk
the thin blade of slapstick and flirtation.
I need something to give me gravitas–boilermakers,
those cigars with the wooden tip–so you
believe me when I say your animal isn’t
an owl made of dust or a fox made of snow.
I picture a raccoon sprawled over your shoulders.
You feed it the sweet drunk of leftovers, promise
it can live in your kitchen when all the trees are gone.

Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His poetry has appeared in Bayou Magazine, New Orleans Review (Web Features), B O D Y, Into the Void, and other journals.

Francesca Leader’s parents met at RISD in the 1970s, moved to Montana, and had a child, who reversed their cross-country migration, and is now a self-taught artist who lives in Northern Virginia.