On watching a movie on the Hallmark Channel by Justin Lacour
Associate Poetry Editor Carmen Ollila on today’s bonus poem: “On watching a movie on the Hallmark Channel” is a poem that captures the absurdist humor in the blend of personalities that makes the genre so enticing. As a somewhat aficionado of the Hallmark movie genre due to my mother, I felt I had to take my stake for this poem. The pairing of a “scruffy free spirit” man and a woman who is “uptight and into her job” illustrates a picture of a couple that could only exist within the fictive environment of the Hallmark Channel. If the narrator ever looks for students outside of the “various trees rocks and feral cats” they speak to, I would like to be one. Lacour has tapped into the delightfully strange mix of oddness, romance, and the notion that “A good burger starts with a good cow.”
On watching a movie on the hallmark channel
i thought those two would never get together always on each others’ nerves he a scruffy free spirit she so uptight and into her job but soon they were ice skating while holding hands in this movie it’s almost Christmas the day my father in law sits at the head of the table and makes pronouncements like “A good burger starts with a good cow” and all the adults nod solemnly so i excuse myself under the pretense of walking the dog watch my own breath smoke under endless stars romance and plot get harder the further out you go i tell my students it’s possible to be lonely in a marriage and by students i mean the various trees rocks and feral cats i speak to
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. @TrampolinePoet1
