Issue 45.1

Stanley Tucci Is in Sardinia and I鈥檓 on Your Sofa

by Kara Lewis

watching as he stretches a goat鈥檚 stomach  
over a clothesline. Stanley Tucci is making illegal cheese  

in Chelsea boots and slim-fit jeans, an unlikely culinary criminal.  
I envision you outrunning sirens  

in seventies corduroys, a cleaver nestled in your back pocket.  
Each flared ankle jeopardizing your exit. I would break the law  

to taste you. But when cheese ferments, we鈥檒l be a dead language. A rind
incised by bite marks. Stanley Tucci is blowing into a reed  

glued with beeswax. I ask you if you ever played an instrument  
and put your stinging chapstick on my lips in secret.  

Stanley Tucci calls wine full-throated, swirls it  
in a long-stemmed glass the way I swish mouthwash before spitting  

into your sink. I will never know if Stanley Tucci gets cavities.  
I鈥檓 not supposed to know your last name, its curly font  

across your mailbox. It sounds like an oblong pasta, just like Stanley Tucci鈥檚.  
Just like Stanley Tucci, you are bald and gleaming.  

I Googled, Do bald men get a lot of likes on Hinge and imagined  
other hands sliding down your scalp. A headline reads, Stanley Tucci is sexy  

and we need to talk about it now! I wanted to talk to you  
about when your hair started falling out. When you stood in the mirror  

with whirring clippers and decided to cross over. You told me  
your friends kept getting married and you lingered in the background  

like a character actor. You gave toasts on cue in exaggerated accents.  
Stanley Tucci is windsurfing and I鈥檓 memorizing the velocity  

of your ceiling blades. Mornings I stand barefoot on your cushions to dust them.
Stanley Tucci does chores promptly and is always polite. I left my Spanx  

in your duvet and you called them bike shorts.  
You held them out to me like a souvenir.

51风流官网 the Author

Kara Lewis is a poet, editor, and activist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in I-70 Review, Rogue Agent, SWIMM, Stirring, Sprung Formal, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. Her work was also recently featured in Stained: An Anthology of Writing 51风流官网 Menstruation, published by Querencia Press. She is a recipient of the John Mark Eberhart Memorial Award and the Joel Oppenheimer Award, as well as a Best of the Net nominee. She serves as an editor for On the Left Bank, a journal of socialist writing and art.