Issue 2.1
Winter 2022
Lucas Pingel
Reflection
I began writing poems in this style when my son was very young. Because I no longer had long stretches of uninterrupted time, I started forcing myself to write in short, frenetic bursts that embraced tension and dissonance to a greater degree than I had ever previously written. While these pieces don't address fatherhood directly, the fears contained within them are certainly reflective of my fears about the earth he will inherit.
from Happy Apocalypse Day
III.
We absorbed every language
Through the flood painted gills on our backs
To assimilate with lost crowds nothing
More beautiful than a beating future
You drum wolves into remission
This is a hit song in our new country
Eventually the tears went back
Into storage you are a sad cellar
All of your bombs have expired
A mirror is a land far away
We draw a city over it we set
The worst parts on fire
I am wearing all of my favorite disasters
Please accept this as a bad joke I made you
Cannot hear my voice break
We are bodies hurled around a universe
Another day of shadow violence all of us
Chew our apology faces no one looking
It will only hurt until our mouths
Collapse and cover our bad haircuts
This mean engine of history
We can chip away at the icicles
And pretend they are not fingers
We can rename this a nice moment
We can scratch the grave with our teeth
*****
IV.
When a thousand icicles grew
From my scalp you wore
A different pose inside each one
I tore their roots spiked them
Across the blacktop those were
All of the poems I had for you
Those were all of the gasoline
Rainbows holding my sleeve
As a fuse made me a bad dancer
If I could pull just one cloud
From my head hang it on the wall
So our children could know it
They were trying to deliver
The message when the poetry died
No mouth could stretch so wide
The final words leapt from their skin
We hummed something familiar we
Buried our shovels deep in the world
Look at this calendar of puddles
Right next to the outlets please
Don’t take a single step further
*****
Lucas's Book Recommendations
Kelli Russell Agodon: Dialogues With Rising Tides.
Ross Gay: Be Holding.
Douglas Kearney: Sho.
Lauren Russell: Descent.
Lucas Pingel lives in the Twin Cities, where he teaches at St. Catherine University. He is the author of three chapbooks, and has work recently published or forthcoming in The Cafe Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Notre Dame Review, among others. With Haley Lasche, he is a
co-curator of the Talking Image Connection, a reading series that seeks to build bridges between the visual arts and literary communities.