The Fucked Up Camping Trip

by justin lacour

i struggle to make conversation with the other dads in cub scouts

maybe we should form a prog rock band Maria Callous then the

moms would come and take away our loneliness as in days gone by

tell them about the dream how every night i battle Edward

Longshanks one night i even got to kill him a rapier through his

black heart and when i lived with the woman from Los Angeles

sometimes in the evening she’d look up from her knitting and say

things like “Tom Waits’s kids are really badly behaved” and you

know life was my MFA but also UMass i miss it up there what the

leaves did in October how i could walk the woods and pretend this

was all a variation on the fisher king that someone was coming to

heal my troubled groin and make the land fruitful again and i hate

the phrase “plus one” for i was without a plus one all through the

swing craze and the craze that followed which had something to do

with big sunglasses