Father gone, mother gone now too, 
am I free at last, free at last? 
No. No. No matter what we do 
we can never escape the past. 

We are, first of all, what they made, 
and second, what we made of that. 
Were every secret to be laid 
open, still would the Cheshire Cat 

be smiling enigmatically 
at the mystery in the middle. 
Say nothing too emphatically. 
Inheritance remains a riddle. 

The loved ones who walk beside us 
may be blissfully unaware 
of those we carry inside us, 
though from our eyes those ghosts do stare. 

Kurt Luchs

won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. His latest poetry chapbook is The Sound of One Hand Slapping (2022) from SurVision Books (Dublin, Ireland). He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Homunculus, poem by Kurt Luchs in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Lives of the Gods, prose poem in MacQ (Issue 7, March 2021)