Eclipse

Like everyone else, we wanted to taste
apocalypse up close and witness the moon lord it
over the sun. So we drove five hours and slept
in a wheat field, donned our eclipse glasses
and traded small talk with strangers from Peoria
and Las Cruces, wolfing someone’s mother’s

sister’s cold empanadas, and waited
for Earth’s warmth to drop ten degrees.
Then we were in the middle of it.
Would an eclipse fill me with kissing angels,
as I hoped, teach me to carry quiet the way
believers carry shaky candles into a bombed-out

cathedral? Shadows shot past us, raw hope
bubbling up on the horizon. Forget cameras,
forget recording wisdom riffs on your cell
to post later. Was I Nostradamus foretelling
volcanoes and earthquakes? Was my beloved
St. Catherine beheaded in an earlier life, but alive

in this one? Words failed us. We were trapped
in a private concert, cosmic light sizzling away
on lead guitar, crooning diva wailing
inside our pounding chests. I put on a hoodie
to keep warm, blinked to stay steady. Then more
dwindled into less till it was over, chirps re-entering

birds, time ticking at our wrists instead
of arcing over our heads like northern lights,
and ants went back to their kingdom of chew
and carry. And a girl in a pink tutu hurried
from group to group dispensing sweaty hugs
to survivors like us stuck in our everyday clay.

-Lance Larsen

Reasons to Hike and Other Non Sequiturs

To climb above the Zeitgeist and burned
lawns spry as a goat—a tired goat, a goat
who hums Johnny Cash to clear my head,
but a goat. To sidearm stones and believe
I too can skip seven times across a glassy pond.

To pass the sniff test with a black lab
named Belle—ankle, knee, crotch,
hanging hands—though we’ve only
known each other for seventeen seconds.
To know I am riffraff but who cares?

I have lungs and legs to follow the riprap
higher. To say I’m blisters but also Loafer
Mountain, dead rabbit pecked by crows
but also mist, like God evaporating
into backstory. What the woodpecker drills

for in the dead pine I stab for in myself,
some crunchy delicious thing. To put
on my boots and to keep putting on
my boots. To float above tree line,
then panic and reel myself back in,

an advocate of gravity, a novice of
thinning air. My tax burden is escarpment,
my Visa bill is chokecherry, my sorrow
is snow that stays and stays but not
forever. To blink just so and disappear.

-Lance Larsen

Seven Women Treading Water

They’re moving their arms, as if shrugging off
clingy children or reaching for lost lovers.
Or maybe auditioning for a re-make of Titanic?
Water aerobics starts soon. They’re early.
One in a red suit, one trying to keep her hair dry,
one swinging her hand as if lassoing the moon.
I watch from the grim crossfit cage above,
glass panels between us. They gather to gather,
the pool more an excuse than a magnet.
I’ve heard them talk, have been invited to join
their splashy communion: a way to break
bread, they’ve told me, to get revenge
on that SOB of an ex, to forget chemo next
week and imagine a former life as a pretty sea
urchin off Key West. These waves are the blue
of mermaids, air the musky waft of hope.
Here one can be unfaithful to everything
but water. Such wavery displacement, such
depth and opacity and eagerness to drown in.
Are they Rubens or Giacometti women?
Wrong question. They would prefer to be
painted by other women or a passing
cloud or not at all. In water we become
water. And now they dance like bees far
from the feral hive, dance to explain
where to find the sweet stuff buried deep.
This one resembles an otter, this one a striped
cyclone, this one a story problem in green.
Are they more like particles or waves,
more like fins of anxiety, tentacles of joy?
Surely other lungers and lifters of my glum
tribe watch with envy. I look around.
Nope, just me—another gym rat doing
pushups, holding my chest a few inches above
the unforgiving world. Soon songs will begin,
sad songs disguised as celebration, songs
their slick bodies know by heart, songs I can
hear through glass but never hear hear.
Their happiness swims circles around mine.

-Lance Larsen

What We Believed

We were fifth graders, of course we believed
in everything: chain letters, Bermuda
triangle, Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirror.
The new girl believed in scratching peace
signs all over her violin case. Tommy Q
believed in improvisation, even if it meant
shoplifting Pepto-Bismol, which he sipped,
like a fancy cocktail, all the way home.
The girl from Lima believed in the glory
of her own bare feet. For a dollar, she’d toss
her hat in the canal after school, then run
the trail faster than angels or squawking
ducks to fish it out with a stick.
Mr. Steal Third Base believed in homeruns.
If he hit one his coach promised to buy him
a shake, two shakes if his homerun ricocheted
off a passing train. The bipolar kid believed
there was a maniac in his head clicking
the wrong channels. Graveyard Girl
said if you close your eyes just right
you can hear the underpass eating cars,
the cemetery chewing up old people, mossy
statues bleeding. Not my great aunt,
Tommy Q said, not the lamb carved
on her stone. Yes, she said, and yes.
To keep my brother safe in Vietnam,
I’d light candles and burn pieces of my hair
as a sacrifice, put on his football jersey
and say prayers to dripping wax. At night,
cats carried light in their whiskers,
and owls carried darkness that drizzled
from the sky. You could connect stars
and make anything you needed—flashlight,
guns, a glowing spider with too many legs
to count. Friday nights, Graveyard Girl,
who swore the moon knew our names,
would gather whoever she could.
Let’s go, she’d say, it’s almost 8:30,
almost time for ghosts in the culvert,
and we’d follow her red hair into the dark.

-Lance Larsen