Leigh Lucas

“The story, he said, it should just move really fast, like pedal to the metal, so it doesn't get boring. Plus it's hard to write, right? You want to go in, get the job done, and get out. Like when I worked for Renee's septic tank cleaning.
I considered this and realized it was the best writing advice I'd received in years. In all my life.”

“In A Mapmaker's Dream, Fra Mauro decides the search for the ultimate map ends with the individual. “Wise men contemplate the world,” he thinks, “knowing full well that they are contemplating themselves.” It may be folly to imagine anything more universal, more objective, more true. Each of us stands at one unique spot in the universe, at one moment in the expanse of time, holding a blank sheet of paper. This is where we begin.”

Bulrush

Every damned day I think of my child,
little floating, accidental, couple

cells, couple pretty pretty curls, I put her in
the many-babies river, I kissed her

off, good go, good go go away
from me and not be mine my

little reaching
little fingery

thing.

From “I Swam in a Cold Lake and Watched My Body Convulse on Shore”

“...
When offering small sandwiches
I might stare out of one of the windows,
imagine the ocean blue. Or, say, when cleaning
up a toddler's vomit, I might yearn
for a less solitary life. But otherwise, loneliness
might be okay when surrounded by other
flight attendants in the sky, my body
a body made for tending to bodies in flight.
I'd breathe in the air of neither
here nor there. I'd remember everything
about my lives on earth.”

Finding the Woodsman

At the end of the road, a doe
dead under a sign: Dead End.

After all these years,
I'm still turning
every stone, looking
under every hoof.

To find a stream.
A rifle cartridge.
An ankle
poking through the dirt like a tulip.