KRISTIN LUEKE / 5 POEMS
template you can use
dear [animal i love],
i am afraid i have become [a terrorsome thing].
[a past wrong] stays with me still.
i wonder if you are [feeling] with me after all of this time.
please. forgive [what you can].
there’s the body & the body it’s true
i’ve been unkind. despite
what i love i have been graceless,
salted water, wound, the road, even—
forgive me—the snail’s trail. never,
if anything’s apart from it, the earth.
but it isn’t, is it.
& the apple fell.
light me up sky mommy, tell me what's real and/or what i have to gain by letting go & letting gosh (for once, i mean when i say i want me here)
remember when you wanted
what you no longer need
deaths by bear (incomplete)
january 19, 2015 / female, 67 years / wild
“…by one of the animals she loved…”
october 17, 1837 / male, age unknown / wild
a well-placed shot is not a victory.
april 30, 2021 / female, 39 years / wild
a mother’s first job is feeding her young.
august 19, 2010 / male, 24 years / captive
mistakes were made.
august 30, 1863 / male, 35 years / wild
same old story.
bear finds trap fails
man finds bear.
july 4, 1996 / female, 32 years / wild
survived by her husband, who did not run.
july 18, 1934 / male, 76 years / captive
why monitor anything at all if not mood?
september 7, 1966 / female, 3 years / captive
a wilderness cannot be leashed.
july 6, 2011 / male, 57 years / wild
“a one in 3 million occurrence.”
what is the conversion of occurrence to moment?
how many moments in two hundred years?
how many bears per mile?
there’s not much truth in data. only subtext.
august 26, 2005 / male, 69 years / wild
while picking plums.
while picking plums
hungary, june 2017
not forgiveness but the rising fash, i was thinking of palinká
served in coffee cups, reading aloud after midnight
we have gone through great rooms together, which thank god
you’d never read because—did you know?—until then
neither had i, when i brought you three ripe plums
i still forget you cannot eat, but admire all the same.
i thought we could eat them outside before the bath house,
walking uphill both ways, disbelieving the length & strange
of these days, our puzzle box years, grey rivers, your hair,
how you opened two bottles of beer off the hull
of a rusted out communist ship, how impatient we are
to be known by now, angry with hunger from time to time,
to know us like something sacred—most days i get it wrong.
you asked me to read it again so i did. i can only carry so much—
my carelessness, the credit cards, every name you don’t retain,
each death by bear, the tropes & tricks you hate to read,
each room i recall i could have been closer, kinder, aware
of the danger had i not been thanking the mountains for stone fruit,
skin touch, choosing to live, despite the daily horrors. maybe
proximity’s more than enough. to be with—without plums?
is more than enough. tomorrow i will remember.
Kristin Lueke is a Chicana poet and author of the chapbook (in)different math (Dancing Girl Press, 2013). Her work appears in Sixth Finch, LETTERS, Wildness, HAD, Maudlin House, Frozen Sea, and elsewhere. She writes and reads poems at www.theanimaleats.com.