Steve Lambert




After John Logan


It’s funny when ducks fly,
She says, and it is.

Some things don’t
Seem made for what
They were made for.

Stop looking at me, she says.

How to go mad is really
How to keep from going mad.

A good drive, like this one,
Is a kind of curative.

I’m sick from this life.
And of other lives.

It’s true, I say.
Ducks are all fucked up.

They keep going
But it doesn’t get
Worse for them.

It doesn’t matter, she says,
And that’s true, too.



An Arrival


It arrived unbidden and brought with it
a feeling of dullness for your life of dullness.

It should have echoed through you, though,
like the sound of dogs barking in an empty house.

Instead it came in sooth, sucked onto a moment
like a flea. What’s true, no matter what, is your
sheet-for-curtains underlife, your real life.

So much anger and abuse and neglect, presumably,
go into this. But there it was, oddly pristine,
like a glimpse of someone else’s misery,

true and oddly welcome. A waste to have taken
so long. Nearly old now, your style of living habitual
and unwild, the unsaid has become almost everything.

Briefly, shame should hollow you out.





Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana and grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared in Adirondack Review, Broad River Review, BULL, Chiron Review, Contrast, The Cortland Review, Emrys Journal, Eunoia Review, Into the Void, Tampa Review, and many other places. In 2018 he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize and he is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the author of the poetry collections Heat Seekers (2017) and The Shamble (2021), the chapbook In Eynsham (2020), and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (2020). His novel, Philisteens, was released in 2021. The collaborative fiction text, Mortality Birds, written with Timothy Dodd, appeared in 2022. He and his wife live in Florida.