Martin Willitts, Jr.

Martin Willitts, Jr edits the Comstock Review. Nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Award; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2020. His 25 chapbooks include the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 21 full-length collections including 2019 Blue Light Award “The Temporary World.” His new book is “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022).

The Calculus of Love

Had my father married someone other than my mother,
I’d have been someone else. Luck has timing
and percentages. Love has elemental properties —
wind, air, earth, blind luck, accidental occurrences.
Too often, love gives sparingly,
like tilling the fields do not equal more crops.
I’ve been adding up all the possibilities,
the randomness of being me,
part alchemy, part end-result.
The world is lush with inspired happenstances.
I cannot calculate the odds that add up to me.
And now, I add you to the equation,
the intersection of us, the Venn diagram of us,
the lucky roll of dice of us.