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Intro to poetry

In the dream, Sylvia Plath and i were running through the forest, trying to escape from men with guns. ‘Let nothing disturb you,’ i said, a bit winded. ‘A lot you know of gender power dynamics,’ she shot back, ‘you who just sit alone in your sad room.’ And in this, she may be correct, for growing up, my room was too small for a girl and besides, there was no door for privacy. This may have been my parents’ plan all along. my poor parents. my libido was like the possessed man who lived in the tombs, cutting himself, and crying in pain, which is admittedly terrifying. All this informed my dream of Sylvia Plath, which is to say, i knew nothing but hunger. The bullets whizzed past our cheeks, ricocheting off trees. Even then, i thought of her poems, the ones that felt like a dart hitting my jugular, and how i might steal her shoes to add to my little altar to her.

Ladies’ nite

Goliath sat down at the bar, not a real bar, the ‘bar’ i run in my backyard, so it’d be more accurate to say Goliath sat down at my picnic table. She fired up a Marlboro Light and i tossed her a wine cooler. i listen as she complains about battle and prophecy, but also how hard it is to make art while raising children. i come from a family of small men. She could lift me up to the top shelf and i’d just have to sit there until she took me down. This seems unlikely to happen, yet i enjoy thinking about it, which hopefully is not a sin. Pleasure in of itself is not a sin unless it gets out of hand. It’s gotten out of hand. Nevertheless, i do not want to die in my sin or even with the little fetishes i’ve accumulated walking up and down the earth, as if perfection consists of having zero needs, which may/may not be true. Goliath can’t be bothered with my double mindedness. She just wants to get a few things off her chest and then some peace and quiet. i’m good for that; i’m a very quiet person. i put out snacks; i light a few candles. Sometimes, Goliath is joined by her friend, Casanova, who is great with child, and they talk, but mostly with pictograms whose meaning is obscure to me.

Summer begins

The hypnodommes are having a race to the bottom. Everytime someone calls me ‘sir,’ i want to rend my garments like Paul and Barnabas when the crowd mistook them for Hermes and Zeus. my children are out of the house, so now is my chance to take a nap or play gangsta rap. i wonder what the sirens’ song sounded like. ‘Maybe like a cross between opera and ambient,’ suggests Jocelyn when she calls from the coast. This is shaping up to be one of those days i don’t change out of sweatpants. i feel sleazy. The hypnodommes want their ounce of tribute, either cash or a new throw rug or a roomba. Please accept instead this gently used copy of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. i negotiate from a position of strength. my strengths include work and prayer, but also the time Coach explained ‘there’s a lot of truth’ in ‘When a Man Loves a Woman,’ particularly the turn-his-back-on-his-best-friend part, for this was no ordinary coach. It was like he’d stripped every father figure for parts to teach us boys life lessons, just not the lesson about men and sonnet cycles, which is a bitter pill to swallow. The muse is generally uninterested. The muse has her own narrative. i’m neither a guttersnipe nor a poppinjay, but some tertium quid. Since my youth, i have waited for a woman to tell me something i wrote was ‘okay,’ though i want neither to be read nor studied as much as i want to be heard.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His first full-length collection of poems, A Reading from the Book of Panic, was published by Lavender Ink in 2025.