W.M. Lobko
Summer 2023 | Poetry
Two Poems
Like Some Huge Inhalation
The drones show with grace & sweep the swell of the avenues,
A kind of kindly oversight, the seen grain of the slow crowd.
The dog uncurls under ghost-blue morning & I get to unjust,
Stand there just to wait, think the pilot in the pink spear point overhead
As the only other awake for miles, for many precincts.
However would I otherwise have known. Isn’t that what all this is for?
No. Nine ten hawks orbit each other, weavingly slow, explore
Their possibilities as many overlapping ellipses.
And I want, to feel it & from there the loping mileage of the roads from
On more aerial scales, the grid between sorghum & corn.
Light at the rate of my own eyes’ slackening. The typeset
Imperial, with bleeding into Imperial. The roads between.
As We Grow More Certain How Much Belongs to the Night,
there will be more,
although light has never been in shorter supply,
& this is worth our faith,
occasions our standing on the road in dread fog
either with the bread of witness, or without it, but
watching, & at hand.
W. M. Lobko’s poems, reviews, & interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Spinning Jenny, & Guernica. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, & was a semi-finalist for the 92Y / Boston Review "Discovery" Prize. He studied at the University of Oregon & currently teaches in the New York City area. Read more at wmlobko.com.