“Today I am occupied…”

Today I am occupied by the corpses
of the newly dead,
they pour in from the screens
of my laptop and television,
they leap through my eyes
and into my head from newspapers lying
on shelves at the convenience store,
they settle straight to my feet
and it seems there’s always room
for more, I am not overflowing
and they weigh nothing.
As for their effect on spacetime
they take up no space at all
and only a few moments
at the top of the hour
on the local classical station.
My heart can take it.
My heart which can take marriage
and divorce and an American
hamburger with a fried egg on it.
My soul, on the other hand…
my soul, my soul is lost
among so many others
falling like snow,
the silence an ink blot
spreading on a tablecloth
claiming the white for its own.

Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize and the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Fiction. He is a Senior Editor of Exacting Clam. His latest poetry chapbook is The Sound of One Hand Slapping (2022) from SurVision Books (Dublin, Ireland).