Poetry by Kristin Lueke

                ​The Grim Atheist CC



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Hand to my stupid heart 
after Cameron Awkward-Rich

Everyone tells you what you are. Bleeding. Big & beautiful. Whole. Open. Vital. You, held in on every side, touching everything important. Always unbroken, whatever the song says. You do not break, I do. Even when I am, I am rarely at the wheel. Out here in the hinterlands I reach, I grasp, hurl helplessly toward harm. Every bone of me has shattered, while you? Beat on, a steady drum, a delicacy. You, hidden or not in every poem. You, the size of me closed. I could urge you back to life if only it were possible. 

           I feel for you instead. 




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The ocean also 

What is the matter of fact, anyway? The matter of floodplains, 
calcite, desert bloom, the insistence of light in every shadow, 
how when you wade into water you get to thinking what breaks 
upon your body bends and flows around you, blameless, 
stays flowing through you too. Who says you're not the ocean also? 
We could walk each other home and say only what we sense:

We bear what we can.
The wind will do what it does.
When the river breaks the banks, best to bless the waters freely.  





I too was once an October afternoon
 
How today the sky ripped open? Unexpected. 
For an hour, maybe two, the clouds insisted 
on themselves. Sunday wept away the sun. 
It was enough to ruin everything. Ruin. 
How careless I can be. 

It surprised even me, when I said it out loud--
I am inconveniently in love. 
As though convenience feels 
like coming home. 

I only want a luscious life. I want to touch 
the tender place our gods meet. I want 
to say your name like this: 

I trust you with my weather. 

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Kristin Lueke is a Virgo, chingona, and author of the chapbook (in)different math, published by Dancing Girl Press. Her work has appeared in HAD, Hooligan, Witch Craft, Untoward, the Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She has some degrees from Princeton and the University of Chicago, and one time, she was nominated for a Pushcart for a poem about revenge. (It didn’t win.)
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