Lindsay Lusby

We Do Our Best Work in the Dark

—seen on the side of a Tojo Mushrooms truck
on the highway outside Richmond, Virginia

This is a love poem.

This is the game in which
we bury ourselves at opposite ends

of the same forest.

Even though we’re underground,
we still close our eyes
to concentrate,

hold one arm above the dead leaves
among the jack-in-the-pulpits—

Testing. Testing. 1-2-3.

To wake the network
of small ghosts between us,

these strands of mycelium—
   a string of lights.

Is this your card?

Three sinuous lines
gilled as a death-cap.

            Listen.
     Here.

To haunt each other
across this wild dark,

we must first forget
our bodies—

let my hands
be your forest floor

& let your mouth
be my mosses running over—

            Is this your card?

A five-pointed bloom,
            blunted earthstar.

Yes,
it glows—
greening with groundlight.

This is where we meet
in the middle

of the night,
of nowhere & grow

so still my heart
cleaves your sternum—

a pale clutch of ghost pipe
beneath the slow patience of oaks.

—for Mark

Note: Zener cards are a deck designed by Duke University’s Parapsychology Lab for experiments in extrasensory perception. The series of shape outlines featured on the cards are a circle, a plus sign, three wavy lines, a square, and a five-pointed star.

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Lindsay Lusby’s debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018) and Imago (dancing girl press, 2014), and the winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared most recently in New South, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North and Plume.