Venus as a murmuration
Every time I see you my body breaks into birds scattering over a raw sky. The songs that ribbon from their black beaks refract as they wheel over dark trees. They become something less than sound that is still not quiet. The impression of movement in a pitch-black room. Every time I let you see me is too bright for me to sit in long. Every time you look at me is too hard for me to hold on to.
 
Tonight I break my body into verbs, smash at it with the hammer of time. Everyone who can't see me right now wheeling over dark trees can break my body into stars. An echo of where you were just standing, the heat of your skin still flush in the air. My body is less than sound, too sharp for me to take for long. Every time I look at you my body weaves itself together out of time.

My name is a sound you could make. Birds with black beaks murmuring, turning the night over, a sudden hush of extended wings. Looming over us like the shadow of a hammer. My body is less than my body, less than quiet, something under everything that thinks of under the sun. The impression of my name in your mind rains all the time. 

You are still, not quiet. 

Every time the hammer cracks something less than sound it leaks black birds. Your name is the only thing in their minds.
Tonight every time I break my name it will be the only thing you won't be able to take for long. An echo of where I last stood, a trickle of smoke stitched into a seam. Every time I think of you is the shadow of a hammer. It's too hard for me to turn the night over to you. It's too bright every time I see you. 


The moon's smoother brother
I look up into a crook of drenched branch 
broken lawn-mowers pile up behind the house 
gears teething on flippant dawn 

You who blanch at these dense rules 
almost crop me out 

I look out on forks in the light blown here
ply thistle out of a shower of copper blossoms 
teeth sleeting over the moon's furrowed face

You wanted to be let down easy
The grass hides where years ago a struck deer lay
down to see branches drip into angles above

I who cherish being the moon's smoother brother
would not hesitate to smother her

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, Anti-Heroin Chic, 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. Lewis can often be found wandering the wilds of Western New York state with his wife Lindsay.