By Josh Luckenbach

Featured Art: i.dissociation. paranoia. by Ahneka Campbell

Up all night shuffling from chair
to bed to couch to floor

and only the flustered trilling
of the soul at its own failing,

decades funneling to this:
narrow opening, fissure

in my hope’s remaining rot
which I had thought

to step through
would mean to surrender to

the dull world (and it would,
though not in the way that I’d feared)—

tunnel-visioned and mourning
the loss of meaning,

up all night and no god; I lost
years like this, hope long since gale-tossed.

Meanwhile whatever it was that was
going to happen never did. Now, finally this—

hot coffee on the front stairs
at daybreak, windswept hair—

this auroral calling forth from night’s
void as mundane as it gets.

That’s it. It’s a deal.
I’m clearing my schedule.

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Josh Luckenbach’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Nimrod, Birmingham Poetry Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, and he currently serves as the managing editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.