Terry Lucas
(from Elemental Sonnets, WIP)
Hymn to Yttrium
O hippy metal number thirty-nine,
getting high on barium copper oxide
turns you freaky enough to levitate
magnets half an inch above your surface.
Energy transcendentalists worship
your mystery in LEDs, blip, blip
of pulsing lasers, cathode ray displays.
Unstable and not just a little bit flaky,
sometimes accused of self-immolation,
you spontaneously combust or shun,
in candle flame or simply in water,
your next-door neighbors, periodically.
About the writer:
TERRY LUCAS is the author of two full-length poetry collections: In This Room (CW Books, January 2016) and Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, October 2016). In addition he is the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks: Altar Call, selected by the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival for the anthology, Diesel; and If They Have Ears to Hear, winner of the 2012 Copperdome Chapbook contest (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2013). He has received numerous other writing awards, including the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Feature Award in Poetry, the fifth annual Littoral Press Poetry Prize, and six Pushcart Prize nominations. Lucas’s poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in dozens of national literary journals, including Best New Poets 2012, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, PoetryFlash, and South 85 Journal. He has taught in the Chicago public school system as a Master Poet in the Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center’s Writing Center and is a guest lecturer for the Dominican University Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Terry is a 2008 MFA graduate of New England College, having studied under Gerald Stern, Maxine Kumin, Alicia Ostriker and Michael Waters. He is the former Co-Executive Editor of Trio House Press, now serving as an Assistant Editor in order to devote more time to his own writing, as well as to his poetry consulting business.
Image: The enigma of the arrival and the afternoon by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). Oil on canvas. 70 x 86.5 cm. 1912. Public domain.
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