Let’s face it: aside from love, painting, pastries 
and surrendering, the French aren’t good for much. 
Did you know they also make cars? 
The Citroën 2CV was the perfect vehicle for our family, 
the size and shape of a Volkswagen Beetle 
but with half the cylinders, like a slow country cousin 
overwhelmed by the big city. 
With all nine of us loaded into it 
the corrugated gray beast could barely make 35 miles per hour. 
On major highways we were often ticketed 
for traveling too far below the speed limit, 
a danger to ourselves and others. 
If those sneering state troopers only knew! 
The convertible model has a roll bar on top 
and for years our father threatened to mount 
an anti-aircraft gun on ours. 
He must have meant it because he had us memorize 
the silhouettes of enemy planes—
German Messerschmitts and Japanese Zeros—
in case we ever saw them flying in force over Lake Michigan. 
Though our 2CV was an embarrassment and a death trap, 
I still miss it—standing up in the back seat, 
hanging on to the roll bar for dear life, 
the wind in my face as I scanned the sky for evidence 
of the invasion that never came to rescue us. 

Kurt Luchs

won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. His latest poetry chapbook is The Sound of One Hand Slapping (2022) from SurVision Books (Dublin, Ireland). He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Homunculus, poem by Kurt Luchs in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Lives of the Gods, prose poem by Luchs in MacQ (Issue 7, March 2021)