Justin Lacour- Poetry

Poem set during my forty-seventh year

So i’m walking behind a woman slinging her yoga mat down Magazine Street.  i’m trying not to look because a saint wouldn’t look. John Coltrane said he wanted to be a saint. i don’t know enough about Coltrane to say whether he ever became one, but i like not knowing; it’s an excuse to buy more books. Sometimes, i’ll be reading and my wife will come over and ask very pointed questions about Mrs. Brisby and the rats of N.I.M.H. and i realize all too late she’s trying to feel out whether i want to have sex, but i’ve already failed the test. There’s something munificent and naughty about sex in the middle of the day. Hitchcock knew that. That’s why Psycho starts the way it does, in a sweltering hotel room on Janet Leigh’s lunchbreak. Oh for such a lunchbreak! my brains scrambled seven different ways before i have to step back into late stage capitalism, where i’m suddenly a man among pigs as if by Circe’s charmed pharmaka. As it is, i have only this yogurt cup. It’s been so long since our last date, though, at this point, i would gladly sit while my wife shaves her legs and pounds a can of Paradise Park. Her legs drive me bonkers. When we worked together, i’d watch her walk across the bookstore carrying stacks of remainders. Those days are gone. Her legs are still here. i could build a philosophy on this, along with the crows and crabgrass i see every day, my sneakers that look like dress shoes, the simple fact that my own legs are beginning to hurt. 

Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline. His first full-length poetry collection, A Reading from the Book of Panic, was published by Lavender Ink in 2025.