a poem by woody loverude

Theory of Churches


Our theory of churches revolves
on the opening & closing of doors.

In childhood, they never locked
& someone was always claiming sanctuary,

a rite not extended to us.  This led
to a confusion of geography, a misunderstanding

of genetics.  There was a narrow refusal
of touch & even when asleep, our blankets

colluded to keep chest from back.  It wasn’t
that we simply wore clothes, but rather

clothes coiled up our thighs, around our biceps.
Outside, the constellations shuffled & the words

of our grandparents turned to pebble in our mouths.
Our family tree inverts every third generation,

when there’s a priest or two, a court case, a handful
of regret tossed to the waves.  The church bells

play pop songs at noon & midnight & make a flash mob
of the townspeople.  The men set aside their lathes,

the women drop their tongues, & even the children
begin to understand the rubble that will come.

Their children’s children will mine the hills
for touchscreens & helium, but find

only half­-filled coffins & books on mythic astronomy.
They will fight, those later years, for dominance & credit,

the right to commune & separate.  To message
ghosts & other kin.  By then, the churches

will have multiplied, the stones growing larger
while congregations sink.  The town lake will ice.




Woody Loverude lives in Brooklyn, and his work can be found in Ninth Letter, Columbia Poetry Review, Mead, Court Green, and elsewhere.  His chapbook, Flood, was published by Shadowbox Press.

a poem by woody loverude

Be Uprooted and Planted in the Sea


There is a brand of escape that eschews misery.
                    A sort of flight without wake or slander.
                                                           So tell us,
                              what’s in your hands?  What’s sitting on your back?

If faith, like the father said over an unsalted dinner,
    is a magician’s dove, explain our love of pietas.
                                           How churches stacked on churches
stacked on churches. How they’re bigger on the inside.

Where the stairs descend for days, and we couldn’t find
                    true north so deep, after that many deaths.
           How a sentence can render a heart to slurry.
                                          How weak it turns out kneecaps are.

                           (Mention pilgrimages, the body hiding nerves in the gut.)

Certain relics are nothing to trifle with:
            a casino chip, styrofoam star,
                                           the musculature of an aging kitten.
                                 These are tests to be passed and origins to be verified
                    and still we’re left uncertain but stifled.

Depending on who we ask, what the world may lack
                     in satisfaction, it certainly gains in quickfire.
         Talk to a surgeon of equity and a teacher of doubt. To believe
                                in a broken thing is to build a wall.

Or a well.  Should we mention the pond?
                      Or go directly to duty and the love of men?
                                          When the mornings are this slow, it may not matter.
                       It’s a very dangerous time.  There’s more razor wire,
              fewer clocks, and the oceans, well, the oceans.

Woody Loverude lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan. His poems can be found in Court Green, Ninth Letter, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

a poem by woody loverude

Have You Seen This Man? This Blue Box?


Of us all, the mannequins look healthiest rioting down Bowery
in their three piece suits and pocketed dresses,
the occasional hollow limb flexing the grid.

We'll never be doctors, are no longer students,
& when asked about our apartments, mutter
It's bigger on the inside.

There are cracks in the sidewalk. Cracks in the walls.
For a moment, silence barrels down the avenues
and our friends and neighbors are forgotten. Never were.

The world is stranger than we expected.

We had so little time with our mothers (gone, gone)
who supplied us with food mill and money clip
until our hairless selves grew rich & fat & loved.

We can’ t remember the books they read us as we slept.
There was something about a god & something about an angry boy
& something about a machine & something about a lightning storm.

It made sense, then. Our mothers said they named a month
after us, but we would only know which when we grew up & married.
Now we’ re adults & it’ s November. Our mothers are far away.

Now we open the refrigerator to applesauce & chutney.
We remember there’ s a war or two.
On the ceiling, we hear the ghosts of our fathers’ footfalls.
We turn the music louder.



Woody Loverude's favorite Doctor is David Tennant & his favorite companion, Donna.