FIVE POEMS BY ANNA LUX

Things

Baby his name is Rufus 

And he wants to give me things,

Telephone calls and homemade picnics

With brie cheese and fresh jam,

Personally picked wildflowers and

Mornings in his lakeside cottage.

He wants to give me all of his

Romance stuffed in poems and

Performed in music, and by music

I don’t mean the cheap stuff

We listen to, I mean the real stuff,

Classical and jazz, the stuff

You listen to in hotel elevators and

Nice restaurants and montages of

Protagonists falling in love. He wants

To cook me medium rare steak and

Tell me with artistic precision how 

The way I write and speak and 

laugh with my eyes and voice and

Even that freckle on my chest makes

Him feel things, like something visceral

Opened within him, like a cosmo fell 

At his feet. And I know because he told me

All this, he told me he wants to play 

Bass on the bare skin of my back. 

 

Baby I’ll give you 

His number and you can break the

News to him for me, you can tell him

I cannot accept the offer, you can 

Tell him that I am very busy 

Waiting in the wings for you, no 

Time for all that monkey business 

When I am hard at work fantasizing 

About us doing the same, pumping

Out poems to get you to want us to do 

The same, sending you love letters 

And guitar covers and pictures of 

My specimen, helping you

Realize that we can do the same,

You can leave everything behind and

I can give you things.

Eleven Eleven

There’s nothing like

this man with the 

white beard and straw hat 

out the window of this

coffee shop. Except 

red wax of this taper 

candle I fired up with

a cigarette lighter that is

creating veins everywhere, 

veins everywhere. 

Also of course

coffee cake and 

oat milk latte, 

red mug with white trim, 

house plant, yarny

scarf at my neck, 

birthmarks placed perfectly

on my chest, on my

carotid, and I heard

that apparently you

picked out 

placement of those 

with your lips,

two lifetimes ago. 

My skirt is fastened with 

brown shoelace, 

my heart is fastened with

flesh shoelace and

I just sent you one of my 

favorite poems, which is 

a song that goes 

Violin bow 

sticking out the window. 

 

How come it feels like 

Heaven on Earth today? 

This morning I ate a

breakfast of chilled pears, 

hard boiled eggs with 

mayonnaise, homemade 

croutons fresh out the 

oven, and I swear I thought 

Wouldn’t mind dying now 

I’ve experienced Heaven,

Which is mostly

 

Concrete bliss 

made of ether and 

our Love being 

sucked out the roots

like marrow. 

When I wriggle the 

esemplastic String 

between us it feels 

like guzzling God 

through a straw. 

My skin is fragrant of

amber and patchouli, 

the other day I was 

thinking of mailing you 

the empty glass bottle

wrapped in tissue so 

you could smell it when 

something overcomes you 

and you need to

be inside of me. 

 

The next bearded man 

out the window has his 

hood up, he is carrying 

two heavy black 

trash bags filled with 

sentimental waste, 

vestigial heirlooms of 

some Life somewhere, 

and I remember that 

I can only exist like this

with the candle dripping

in the coffee shop

because he is out there 

carrying those burdens,

in here drinking those 

burdens, yellow and

foamy.

Presents

And the sea, she is grappling:

Am I allowed to feel beautiful?

Am I allowed to feel?

Am I?                          Am I?


She rises, and glistens, and crashes,

She rushes toward my ankles—knees—

She is my knees!

She is!                         She is!

 

With fervor, with fever:

Yes, Mom, yes

(Et tu, et tu)

Shall we devour this together?

 

Shall we turn into kaleidoscopes and never return?

Things Will Change if You Let Them

If you were to see me now you’d see wavey springs

Scattering my face and skull, some mystic 

Diaspora from the Source herself, the

Twenty-three-year-old goddess that

Adopted me next to the sea, saw my

 

Inflamed Soul after college and said 

“Come, come” and I knew it was time, I

Surrendered to her magnet and 

Sucked down my daydream.

I am less now but in a good way.

 

My family visits and side-eyes her, 

They do not like her stillness, 

They do not think it is becoming of me. 

And they are green with the curls on my head,

They whisper “witch” behind her back, for

 

I spent two decades with deadened flatness

Against my neck, until one day she touched 

My mane, taught me how to twirl it with my 

Fingers in humid post-shower silence,

And ever since I appear in the mirror,

 

Wild and familiar,

And we enter the shops together,

Twin-like and imagined.

All those years I spent hurting, doing, starving and

Now I lay on the sand beside her and sob, I tell her

 

I am grieving, I am grieving, I am grieving.

Summertime Visit Home

It is August eleventh and the winter coats are hanging

On the hook next to the front door

You can’t escape the cold in Chicago

Even if you try because there’s 

Nowhere to store the damn coats in her

Sheffield apartment so

They’re all just sub-waiting 

For their eyeballs to freeze over

            I think I got a cavity

            Where?

Maddy pulled down her bottom lip

Revealed rot between the two 

Teeth in the center and

 

Grampa has started pulling his socks 

Up to where his 

Shorts meet his knees

(All that skin cancer)

            It’s either that or pants 

Gramma is ready to go and 

I don’t blame her 

Gramma I don’t blame you

It’s time the check was paid and

We got the hell out of here and

 

Dave and Paul have never kissed

In front of me 

Maybe they’re too busy making

Just another gimlet, just 

Another gimlet for the road

On out of here (Get me the hell out of here)

They aren’t hiding anything really

I see the phallic shapes in

Everything, nothing even, especially the

Painting on their dining room wall

Dave will you walk me down 

The aisle if my Dad kicks the bucket? 

Dave will you pretend that it’s 

Not all that bad after all? And

 

When I walk into the kitchen in the morning

Mom is sitting at the dinner table with

Her earbuds in, solemn, solemn

            What are you listening to?

            Nothing, nothing

He just sent me a song 

Christ              (I’ve got to get out of here

Before I remember everything) and

God is saying:

Anna Lux

is a queer and neurodivergent twenty-three-year-old emerging poet originating from the industrial suburbs of Chicago, IL. She recently graduated from the University of Alabama with a futile degree in Biology and currently resides on the beachy coastline of North Carolina.

Cover photo by Anastasios Antoniadis on Unsplash