MEDITATION WHILE DRINKING A LAGUNITAS
by Justin Carter
This one time, I was drinking a Lagunitas beer and the title of the Robert Hass poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” jumped into my head. This poem doesn’t necessarily borrow a lot of the language from the Hass poem, but it uses the first two lines—which are used below as an epigraph for the piece—as a jumping off point.
“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.”
Dim lit. A kind of thirst
for understanding what, it seems,
will not be understood. Across
the bar, two men argue over the outcome
of a basketball game that barely matters--
it’s February, both teams flailing,
out of contention. They watch as an elegy
to what they’d once hoped for. Often,
I wonder why I do these things,
however I want to define things. Right now,
I’ve fallen behind on it all. Kitchen sink
ready to topple, a Babel of dried sauces.
Library books overdue. Invoices
I never sent. All life is: reaching backward,
then forward, unable to grasp
what we’ve reached for. The team
with three more wins this season
winds up losing & for a brief second
it seems the men will come to blows,
but that, too, passes. Once
I thought I’d lost something without
knowing what that something was--
a vague ache inside. Maybe
it was more than just once. That time,
I bought a bottle of wine, thought
about taking it to the old Brazos River bridge,
& just sitting there, let the night
cover me. Ask me if I did it & I’ll tell you
the actions aren’t what’s relevant. Here
I am, left behind by time. Soon
those dishes will fall from their precariousness
& soon, the two basketball teams
will play again, even deeper into loss
by that point. The bar’s empty
by now. Mostly—nothing ever, really,
is empty. The men have gone
but the stools are still in their spot.
AN OLD POEM I REWROTE AFTER READING A LOT OF LEIGH CHADWICK POEMS
by Justin Carter
This poem is very much what the title says it is. I’m working on a manuscript of poems that revolve around sports and I was looking at this poem I wrote a decade or so ago, trying to decide if it was good enough for the manuscript, and my ultimate decisions was—ehh, not quite. But I’d been reading a lot of Leigh Chadwick poems at the time and when I saw Cowboy Jamboree’s call for the Covers issue, I thought that maybe revisiting this poem but trying to bring some of that Chadwick spirit to it might be what the poem needed.
I want to write your heart is the only truth but that’s a lie, the only truth is LeBron James & that truth is subjective depending on how close you are to Chicago when you say tell me about greatness. I wake up & Christian Laetner is sinking shots out in the driveway. That’s where he’s been, if you were wondering. If you could be any Berryman poem, which would you be? My response: I’d be a Juwan Howard free-throw line jumper because nothing’s more beautiful, I’d be Caitlin Clark draining threes from the logo, I’d be anything but anything. Let’s learn how to be incredible, or maybe let’s learn the best way to die, or maybe let’s just learn them both. There’s too much to learn. I want Dennis Rodman to teach me about the soul. I want to break like thar backboard after the Shaq dunk. I want to transform myself like a center whose new coach plans to play five-out offense. Adapt or perish.
LOVE POEM THAT IS ALSO A HY-VEE COMMERCIAL
by Justin Carter
inspired by Matthew Olzmann’s “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem”
This Tuesday, a sale on strawberries, $2.99 per pound. Ginger chews, $1.49 all day. Pepsi Zero Sugar Mango, two boxes for just $11. But what, you say, does that mean, the two for, do you have to buy two of them. It doesn’t matter—if the price requires the purchase of two, I’ll purchase two. If it requires three, four, hundreds…what does the volume matter if it’s the thing you want. Thursday only, a sale on the Chiefs Super Bowl t-shirt you didn’t want to pay full price for, on that BlackStack Hazy IPA that’s usually $8.99 for a 16 ounce can. By the way, did you hear? Next week, they’ll have the Hy-Vee IndyCar team there doing mock pit stops for the crowd. They’ll take the tires off & put them back on so fast you won’t believe they changed anything at all. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s all just marketing. Let me know if you’d like to go.
by Justin Carter
This one time, I was drinking a Lagunitas beer and the title of the Robert Hass poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” jumped into my head. This poem doesn’t necessarily borrow a lot of the language from the Hass poem, but it uses the first two lines—which are used below as an epigraph for the piece—as a jumping off point.
“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.”
- Robert Haas
Dim lit. A kind of thirst
for understanding what, it seems,
will not be understood. Across
the bar, two men argue over the outcome
of a basketball game that barely matters--
it’s February, both teams flailing,
out of contention. They watch as an elegy
to what they’d once hoped for. Often,
I wonder why I do these things,
however I want to define things. Right now,
I’ve fallen behind on it all. Kitchen sink
ready to topple, a Babel of dried sauces.
Library books overdue. Invoices
I never sent. All life is: reaching backward,
then forward, unable to grasp
what we’ve reached for. The team
with three more wins this season
winds up losing & for a brief second
it seems the men will come to blows,
but that, too, passes. Once
I thought I’d lost something without
knowing what that something was--
a vague ache inside. Maybe
it was more than just once. That time,
I bought a bottle of wine, thought
about taking it to the old Brazos River bridge,
& just sitting there, let the night
cover me. Ask me if I did it & I’ll tell you
the actions aren’t what’s relevant. Here
I am, left behind by time. Soon
those dishes will fall from their precariousness
& soon, the two basketball teams
will play again, even deeper into loss
by that point. The bar’s empty
by now. Mostly—nothing ever, really,
is empty. The men have gone
but the stools are still in their spot.
AN OLD POEM I REWROTE AFTER READING A LOT OF LEIGH CHADWICK POEMS
by Justin Carter
This poem is very much what the title says it is. I’m working on a manuscript of poems that revolve around sports and I was looking at this poem I wrote a decade or so ago, trying to decide if it was good enough for the manuscript, and my ultimate decisions was—ehh, not quite. But I’d been reading a lot of Leigh Chadwick poems at the time and when I saw Cowboy Jamboree’s call for the Covers issue, I thought that maybe revisiting this poem but trying to bring some of that Chadwick spirit to it might be what the poem needed.
I want to write your heart is the only truth but that’s a lie, the only truth is LeBron James & that truth is subjective depending on how close you are to Chicago when you say tell me about greatness. I wake up & Christian Laetner is sinking shots out in the driveway. That’s where he’s been, if you were wondering. If you could be any Berryman poem, which would you be? My response: I’d be a Juwan Howard free-throw line jumper because nothing’s more beautiful, I’d be Caitlin Clark draining threes from the logo, I’d be anything but anything. Let’s learn how to be incredible, or maybe let’s learn the best way to die, or maybe let’s just learn them both. There’s too much to learn. I want Dennis Rodman to teach me about the soul. I want to break like thar backboard after the Shaq dunk. I want to transform myself like a center whose new coach plans to play five-out offense. Adapt or perish.
LOVE POEM THAT IS ALSO A HY-VEE COMMERCIAL
by Justin Carter
inspired by Matthew Olzmann’s “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem”
This Tuesday, a sale on strawberries, $2.99 per pound. Ginger chews, $1.49 all day. Pepsi Zero Sugar Mango, two boxes for just $11. But what, you say, does that mean, the two for, do you have to buy two of them. It doesn’t matter—if the price requires the purchase of two, I’ll purchase two. If it requires three, four, hundreds…what does the volume matter if it’s the thing you want. Thursday only, a sale on the Chiefs Super Bowl t-shirt you didn’t want to pay full price for, on that BlackStack Hazy IPA that’s usually $8.99 for a 16 ounce can. By the way, did you hear? Next week, they’ll have the Hy-Vee IndyCar team there doing mock pit stops for the crowd. They’ll take the tires off & put them back on so fast you won’t believe they changed anything at all. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s all just marketing. Let me know if you’d like to go.