DEFINITIONS OF LUCKY ARE TOO NUMEROUS

By Kent Shaw / Issue 10

An object was drawn first on a piece of paper,
then another piece of paper.
Then arches were drawn. Then the object drew another object on top of it.
It was an envelope. The object wasn’t happy with just an envelope.
The object drew fantasy and oblong. The object got sweaty.
The object was my friend.
I was drawing the object on other pieces of paper,
while the object, how does an object get so lucky, was modeling in Los Angeles.
It was attracting other objects.
The object was getting very specific.
It was being drawn with fingers and leg rolls and ways of sniffing the air.
The object was getting objectified. Totally objectified.
The Los Angeles airports and freeways and objects were not not.
They were objects.
They said, “I am drawing an object.”
It will appear on paper as soon as it arrives.
An object passes other objects in the street. Definitions of lucky are too numerous.

KENT SHAW is the winner of the 2018 Juniper Prize for Poetry for his collection Too Numerous. His first book, Calenture, was published by University of Tampa Press. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Literary Review, and Memorious. He’s an Assistant Professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.