Justin Lacour

THE BIG SKY

About twenty years ago, I was at a party at some guy’s house.  A circle of us were in the kitchen, cheering on two guys. One had a ketchup bottle, the other a bottle of mustard, and they were holding them, crotch-level, squirting long streaks of ketchup and mustard on the floor, while we clapped in unison. The guy whose house it was came in and said “What the fuck are you doing?” and some other guy put the guy whose house it was in a choke hold, presumably to keep him from killing the guy with the ketchup and the guy with the mustard. The guy whose house it was just accepted it, as if this was something that happened all the time. Look, to be honest, I may be conflating two different parties. I don’t really know anymore. I’m pretty sure this was the party where I walked back to town alone. The cold stung my face and when I squinted, I thought the stars looked like Anarchy A’s. And later, I saw you in the bar with the weird fluorescents that reminded me of an aquarium. And later still, I said “I don’t give a shit about your revolution,” because I thought you should be honest, particularly at the beginning. There were shadows and a song that was really just an extended horse metaphor. Outside, we saw a cloud the size of a city block splitting into smaller clouds. We held hands. The small clouds looked like toddlers’ faces. They seemed to drift into a circle above your car. Neither of us wanted to go home. I don’t know how much longer I can keep telling you these fantastic things.

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JUSTIN LACOUR lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the minnesota review, Bayou Magazine, the New Orleans Review (Web Features), and other journals.

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