Jack Conway

MY PICNIC WITH LOLITA

I brought the cherries.
I hoped for heart-shaped sunglasses,
a lollipop, from the movie poster.
I walk to class so weary of hearing them talk.
Poetry isn’t literary, I quote.
It doesn’t know the parts of speech.
Write what you know, I say,
trying to make it sound new.
She tells me her parents died,
at a picnic, just like this.
“Lightning,” she says, and I think,
Billy Collins beat me to it already.
“Lie down,” she says, “Take your coat off.
I’ll rub your back. I did for Nabokov.”
I do as I am told and think,
this is why he invented her and I invited her.
Someday, she will wish to be pretty one more time.
Later, at my desk, I feel a shooting pain up my arm,
a tightness in my chest. So this is my death.
Here. Now. With so many papers still to correct
and wish I could have died at my picnic, with Lolita,
by lightning, instead.

—from Rattle #20, Winter 2003

Jack Conway

SONGS FOR WOULD-BE SUICIDES

Everyone wants to believe in magic but still they
ask, how the trick is done. Poor Uncle Arthur
contracted a sunburn down his throat from falling
asleep at the beach with his mouth wide open. No one
knew the benefits then of sun screen, never mind
how it could be applied. He died in a sit-down
lawnmower accident, one of the worst in the state.
Aunt Kate never bothered to cut the grass again.
She found a golf ball in a bird’s nest in a pine tree
and opined, “Just imagine the time that bird,
wasted waiting on something that would never hatch.”
She grew old just like that, in the house, alone,
surrounded by a sea of grass and when I asked
why she never cut it with the mower left in the shed,
after Uncle Arthur’s untimely death she said
she didn’t know how to start it.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006