Poetry By Kristin Lueke

Jeff Ruane CC




i went to chicago like everyone does, unprepared

but i was loving, and my coat was atrocious. and now? 
it likely floats in the ocean, undying, unlike everything 
i hold dear. i stayed for good reasons. it wasn’t
the cigarettes, being 28 at 2am, or even the blue line, 
not even the hot dogs. it wasn’t the endless rows 
of parking meters stacked parasitically as police
along lonesome asphalt lots cracked with indian grass 
in this big-shouldered, meat-grinding machine of bad
sanctuary, where every type of municipal violence 
has been imagined by near-dead unholy bastards, perfected 
for two million dollars a day. it wasn’t the cruelty. 

it was the way a place lets you see it: rotten 
with potential, ripened to the core with every sort 
of survival, story, laughing even, lightly liquored up 
and layered, one year at a time, a little more sensibly.
not much. we can leave what we love. bring a good coat.





we should go to school for breathing 

it took me leaving. everything. saying yes to stillness. 
what once was possum left four months to sink 
into the sidewalk, reclaimed long since by scavenger, 
pearlwort, bittercress, what grows where dying goes. 
dandelions, whose name i say sleeping. it took taking 
the only man i'll marry by the hand and saying 
what i wanted for once. to fuck under full moonlight. 
it took my nakedness. forgiving it. body on sunday, 
covered in mud. body on sunday breaking, baking bread, 
myself, late afternoon. god-sun in september. 

i wasn't born patient—i made me this way. believing 
the black birds show me. it took believing. when i say 
i mean faith. i mean—could you look at me now and not 
say miraculous? i call you just the same. my dove. 
i am telling you. take what you love close to you.
lay a blanket on the grass.

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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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