Poetry By Lewis LaCook

Lee Coursey CC



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The light above the canopy 

Everybody is a map of somewhere else. The roads you see trickling through hills here are not local. Where you end up depends on who you talk to.

I went to the woods to climb fungal shelves until at last I reached the light above the canopy where I couldn’t be touched. My skin bubbled and smoked away until all that remained of me was a memory of your lips moving. You said something I couldn’t hear and by the time the words reached me there was nowhere for them to go. This is what you find in rest stops around here.

I went to the woods because I needed immensity to think in.  I tried to be everything I could imagine but then I was just alone between November’s little yellow teeth.

Everybody feels that the overcast sky is draining you. You’re a map left in someone else’s hands. The driver pulls over every few miles at convenience stores in truck plazas where he grazes on cigarettes and scratch-offs. Tar coats the lungs, makes them immune to diesel fumes. 

The rest stops around here don’t sell what you need.

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As a child, on interstate trips, Lewis LaCook thought the moon was following his family’s Econoline van. Upon reaching adulthood, he couldn’t tell whether the truth disappointed or relieved him, so he started writing things down. Some of these things looked like poems, and they may have appeared in journals like Lost And Found Times, Otoliths,Unlikely Stories, Whiskey Tit, Lotus-eater, Synchronized Chaos, Argotist Online Poetry, Medusa’s Kitchen,Exist Otherwise and Slope, among others. In 2012 BlazeVOX published Beyond the Bother of Sunlight, a book-length collaboration with Sheila E. Murphy; previously, Anabasis published his book-length poem Cling. His collection My Kinship with the Lotus-eaters was published in 2022 by BlazeVOX.(http://wp.blazevox.org/product/my-kinship-with-the-lotus-eaters-by-lewis-lacook/) Lewis can often be found wandering the wilds of Western New York state with his wife Lindsay.