Kristin Lueke
The last of the five good emperors
For Pablo
This morning you rose
(as the morning before)
to a world that is not yet done.
What has happened has happened.
You are what you are—swaggering,
staggering, ancient stardust,
you-shaped lump of a boy,
a trillion cells assembled just so,
reshaped by every song (it seems)
these days and every sunset.
Oh brother, you're braided
between these hours—
the light comes and goes again.
In the middle you breathe,
you break your own heart,
you mend, you murder a plant or two,
you spend, you stutter,
you see from the summit
how mountains fall into the sea.
You say to me, little,
learn to live without knowing,
I say to you never and still,
what a strange lovely world,
like you, like me, undone and yet
we rise.
This morning you rose
(as the morning before)
to a world that is not yet done.
What has happened has happened.
You are what you are—swaggering,
staggering, ancient stardust,
you-shaped lump of a boy,
a trillion cells assembled just so,
reshaped by every song (it seems)
these days and every sunset.
Oh brother, you're braided
between these hours—
the light comes and goes again.
In the middle you breathe,
you break your own heart,
you mend, you murder a plant or two,
you spend, you stutter,
you see from the summit
how mountains fall into the sea.
You say to me, little,
learn to live without knowing,
I say to you never and still,
what a strange lovely world,
like you, like me, undone and yet
we rise.
Biography
Kristin Lueke (she/her) is a Virgo, chingona, and author of the chapbook (in)different math, released by Dancing Girl Press. She has poems featured in Hooligan, Witch Craft Magazine, Untoward, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She holds an AB from Princeton and MA from the University of Chicago, and one time, she was nominated for a Pushcart for a poem about revenge. (It didn’t win.) She runs a small design studio in Chicago, still dreams of California, tweets when she feels like it @klooky, and writes a weekly newsletter called The Animal Eats.
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