What holds the light

by Alejandro Lucero

holds me too like a bottle’s glare
in the hand of a hard-working man crashed on the sofa.

I try not to measure time in school years
but as sophomores a bunch of us

studied how the sun’s glow disappears
into the resin-black hole of a pyrex pipe.

How to sanitize a mouthpiece we kissed
with a Bic. We learned the spread of germs

by blowing smoke into each other’s
pursed lips—a closeness we took

for distance. We boys who rode the schoolbus
from the ranch had too much brightness

in our eyes—a sunrise that bothered us awake.
We proudly wore our sun-damaged flesh, made promises

across that narrow aisle to punch each other
back to drowsy, to keep our voices down

to murmurs. All we talked about in hush,
coupled in the loveseats of the worn-down bus,

was leaving home once the carne seca from our final hunt
finished dehydrating over the wood stove. I only wanted

a place where the blinds worked. Where
I could let the living room go dark. Rely on muscle

memory to walk me to my bedroom, put me to sleep
under a light bulb I keep cool and empty.

Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the 2022 Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press 2024). His latest work appears in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, RHINO, and The Southern Review. He lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and is a managing editor for The Hopkins Review.