The only approved addiction in the land 
of working till you drop, it’s a cup of life, 
no matter how bitter we always want more, 
cream and sugar, real or not, cannot quite quell 
the taste of darkness that drags us into light 
kicking and screaming inwardly as our heart 
accepts the imitation adrenaline 
and the fight or flight response triggered thereby, 
nothing to fight but sleep, nowhere to fly but 
deeper into the day’s minutia, awake 
in body and mind alone, the soul still lost 
in the waves of Lethe, not to be restored 
to mindfulness of itself by anything 
so trivial as the hot kiss of caffeine. 

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 in MacQ (Issue 7, March 2021)