Michael Lauchlan

Landing

If the back stairs of the old flat
constitute a gray container for time,
my father still snoring on the upper porch
and the downstairs tenant cursing from her kitchen
and me both 10 years old
and 70, suspended on a landing between,
maybe the onions and potatoes and meat
no longer simmering but now
annealed to a pot my father
has forgotten on the stove,
maybe that stench that really can’t
be called a cooking smell mixes
with the ash of a house fire of a store
burning of the latest bombs falling
and films my tongue even when I laugh,
and maybe everyone I pass crossing
the busiest street is carrying a stairway
and if we could see them teetering
like Chaplin’s stacked up burdens
in manic silent movies, we might
wonder how traffic ever gets past
such tangles of stringers and treads
such clouds of falling soot.

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Michael Lauchlan has contributed to many publications, including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore and Lake Effect. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave. from WSU Press.