The Flu Hour (Douglas Luman)

At the note of an owl’s hoot,  a field  mouse  is  made  into  a  packet
for its suffering. &  here I set  to  nonsense,  boiling  a  house  worth
of   barley,   knowing   a   kidney’s   grip.  The  trouble,   honesty    &
prepositions; when a fox’s kin is suddenly lifted from its grief, what
separates me & a raptor’s kindness? On suggestion, the woods snap
to a cricket factory.  Kindness:  nature stops with what’s larger than
its   belly.   See  the  oak  at  the  end  of   the  walk?  O,  it  will   turn
into a sculpture at dawn; there’s a thought: sleep in a knotty hollow
harder than a skull.

I arrive home to dusty junk,  busted pottery,  the  sound of keys—any
of these nouns, stuff of atonal melody. Testing the notes, I tumble on
a bundle of sticks.  Accidents  will  kill  me.  An example: waking isn’t
an  intentional  thing.  And  if  your  skeleton  refused?  The  world  is
worse  for  wonder,  &  I  owe  myself  more  sleep;  to tend or weed  a
dewy rock garden, to lie twisted in some sheets.


Douglas Luman is a student in the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia where he teaches odd classes about chance and coincidence in contemporary literature. He is also the Book Reviews Editor for the Found Poetry Review.