Gregory Luce
Too Close
(after Heisenberg)
The way when you look
too close you don’t see
everything clearly when
you look right into your lover’s
eyes and can’t see the pain
plus he’s good at hiding it
anyway and he looks back
and can’t see the history
that comes alive every time
he raises his voice
plus you don’t talk
about it anyway
as autopsies say
no visible marks or scars
not even a birthmark
they get embedded later
and very deep.
Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), and Tile (Finishing Line Press, 2016). In addition to numerous journals, his poems have appeared in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing, 2011), Unrequited: An Anthology of Love Poems about Inanimate Objects (CreateSpace, 2016) and Candlesticks and Daggers: An Anthology of Mixed-Genre Mysteries (CreateSpace, 2016). Recipient of the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, awarded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Luce is retired from National Geographic, works as a creative writing instructor for Writopia Lab, and lives in Arlington, Virginia.
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