“How to Survive Asbestos,” “Carpet,” “Moon Pie”

By Raymond Luczak

HOW TO SURVIVE ASBESTOS

The house of us is fragile.

Its walls are paper-thin.

Secrets are drafty as wind.

Promises are futile preventions.

It’s in everything we’ve built.

Our home is made of chemicals.

We need to be careful not to inhale.

Our lungs are taxed with hurt.

The TV screen blares warning.

We gauge the distance between ourselves.

Our hearts are tanks of petrol.

We can’t afford a rupture.

All I ever want is a kiss of caulk

from you to heal and seal.

Raymond Luczak (raymondluczak@gmail.com)

CARPET

Weave dog hairs into vortices that wave and bend like wheat rolling across oceans

all over Kansas. Love and affection are the stuff of pollen.

An overlong thread cut off a button is a forgotten song drifting far away to be heard,

the scratch of needle burrowed in time.

Lintballs are jewels against the rust belts of shadow, waiting to leap again

like dandelion whiskers with nothing else better to do.

The pebbles once stuck inside the bank ridges of your sneaker soles are blackheads

buried in the scalp of carpet.

Such tiny seeds. It’s high time that you pull out the vacuum cleaner to harvest.

You are a farmer.

Raymond Luczak (raymondluczak@gmail.com)

MOON PIE

1.

At the National Air and Space Museum,

a small chunk of moon was glued to the counter.

It looked like any other rock, worn down

smooth into an indescribable gray.

I touched it, as had thousands of other visitors,

hoping to elevate myself 200,000 miles instantly.

2.

On Saturday nights when I was alone on campus,

I ventured out to the Ely Student Center

where a vending machine offered moon pies.

I couldn’t afford a night out at the gay bars

lining up and down P Street off Dupont Circle,

but I usually had a spare dollar bill for a pie.

3.

The moon’s most common element is oxygen,

approximating 60% of the crust by weight.

There’s also silicon, aluminum, calcium,

magnesium, iron, and titanium.

How I wanted to bite into that airy crust

like an astronaut with a handsome date.

Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 25 titles, including Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories (Modern History Press) and once upon a twin: poems (Gallaudet University Press). His work has appeared in Poetry, Passages North, and elsewhere. An inaugural Zoeglossia Fellow, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.