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upstage center: dead boy

we show up in black for the funeral because hello we’ve seen the movies

                 shuffle our pamphlets
                                                             
pose in stained light  

                                                                                             sway      (literal organ music)  

ha ha, darling, amour  

                                                                       the tiny sandwiches are to die for!

to set this scene  

                                               thousands(!) of grieving girls  

                              ballet flats, steam-pressed brows, fists clutching scrunched up snot tissues, 

                              in the pews the chorus sniffles, rows and rows  

                 an actor tries to cry,         a person, a person, tries not to —

Cover Art: In the Beginning, by Adriano Marinazzo

Leigh Lucas

Leigh Lucas is a poet and writer in San Francisco. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and a BA from Stanford in Creative Writing. Winner of AWP’s 2020 Kurt Brown Prize for an emerging poet and a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in Smartish Pace, The Tusculum Review, Driftwood, and LEON Literary Review, among others. She has been awarded residencies at Tin House Summer Workshop, Community of Writers in Olympic Valley, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is at work on her first poetry collection, a lyric essay about love and loss.

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