The spirit is willing but the flesh is even more willing 
and has led me into many errors 
as well as some marvelous discoveries, such as: 
I didn’t know you could do that. Amazing! 
Over the years I have come to agree with Hemingway 
that what is moral is what you feel good after 
and what is immoral is what you feel bad after, 
with a few minor exceptions like heroin and revenge. 
The body knows more than we give it credit for. 
Its memories, unlike ours, include those of numberless ancestors 
stored like potent cups of espresso in a rest stop vending machine 
until we need a rush of energy for a fight to the death 
or a job interview (perhaps the same thing?). 
The body often does our thinking for us, 
nor is there any shame in admitting 
it is usually the better thinker. 
When I enter a room and instantly feel 
the presence of evil in one of the people there, 
coiled and watchful, that is my body speaking, and I listen. 
Instinctively I begin evaluating the exits 
and assessing what common objects could double as weapons. 
Frequently the flesh is the first to recognize 
when we have met the person we belong with, 
sending a parade of joyful fire engines to the heart and brain, 
though as Randy Newman says in one of his haunting 
early songs, I’ve been wrong before. 

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 collections, Death Row Row Row Your Boat (2024) and Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press, along with his newest book, Tributaries: Essays & Verses Flowing From & Celebrating Favorite Poems (December 2025). He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Author’s website: https://kurtluchs.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Tributaries (a blend of literary criticism and original work that traces an author’s dialogue with the poems that inspire him) in Kirkus Reviews (4 November 2025)

⚡ The Incredibly Sexy World of Collector’s Plates by Kurt Luchs in Exacting Clam (No. 15, Winter 2024); in which we learn that he interviewed celebrities in his twenties, including Red Skelton (1981), the comedian who was also an artist who produced a thousand “corny clown paintings” and wrote thousands of songs (many of which were licensed by Muzak). Luchs also interviewed Shirley Temple Black in 1981, who was, as he was fascinated to learn, “this incredibly intelligent, well-read woman.”

⚡ Area Satire Rag Turns 35: The Real History of Fake News in which Luchs discusses the ten rules of writing for The Onion (which he did for several years) and the history of written humor in America; in Exacting Clam (No. 7, Winter 2022)

⚡ Contributor’s page for Kurt Luchs at Exacting Clam; scroll down for links to 22 of his works that are available online (Summer 2021 through Autum 2025). Others appear in printed issues of Exacting Clam, the quarterly magazine of arts and ideas published by Sagging Meniscus Press.

⚡ Some Cats, poem by Luchs in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 27, March 2025); nominated for Best of the Net 2026

⚡ First One at the Diner, prose poem by Luchs in MacQ-27 (March 2025)

⚡ Crime Prevention in Wheaton, Illinois, poem in MacQ-20 (September 2023)

⚡ Lives of the Gods, prose poem in MacQ-7 (March 2021)