Kurt Luchs

Kurt Luchs has poems forthcoming in Former People Journal, Into the Void, Minetta Review, Poydras Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Otis Nebula, among others. He founded the literary humor site TheBigJewel.com, and has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as writing comedy for television (Politically Incorrect and the Late Late Show) and radio (American Comedy Network). In 2017 Sagging Meniscus Press will publish his humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny).

Summon the Stones

Summon the stones,
we’ll hold them accountable,
we’ll make them answer
held at gunpoint for seven years.
I would speak
with them for news
of the planet.
I’m anxious to hear
the gossip of the dust,
I understand
the quartz does not include me
in its white dreams,
the sands
in low tones are passing
a name
one to the other.
Not our name.
And they say
the mountains have joined hands,
building paradise
behind our backs
while we stare at the widening
crater before us,
speechless,
turning to stone.

Still

There is the stillness of rot,
mold slowly, quietly overrunning and reclaiming
the fruit.
This is not that.
The stillness of fear, of children huddled in the closet
without breathing,
hiding from the drunken father.
Nor that either.
And the stillness of death, in which only the beards
and fingernails of the departed
can grow.
No.
This is something completely
other, a stillness that engenders
the more we are entangled and unable
to tell where one leaves off and the other
begins,
making sounds we can’t even hear ourselves
no longer aware of ourselves,
a stillness more pronounced for being
anything but silent.
The stillness of wonder that such a moment
can still be in a world of
rot and fear and death.
When we were younger this might have led
to a baby, but that was long ago
in another life.
Still we are making something new
between us, two into one,
blue eyes and brown,
me into you,
hands cradling faces
like rivers searching for an ocean
without a shore.