Eighteen days after our dog died, my husband dreamt of her.
i think you can learn a lot about a person
based on their Super Smash Bros main. or starsign.
or by asking. how convenient to be told? to learn
in spite of our own misgivings. part of growing
I wake to the shuffle of wind along the sill.
The soft moon hue weighs on my blanket, saying nothing.
From the fragile dark, experiences remembered
become rocks tied to my ankles and feelings churn
Ask me now about Grandma’s house and I’ll recall the ocean-carpet, candy, bossa nova, cousin, shotgun, books. I won’t mention the adult woman in a crib—a person who was someone’s daughter, sister—and I guess, aunt—for a lifetime.
Friday night, I swipe the side mirror off my Nissan Sentra and can no longer see what's behind me. No major loss. I've never been particularly interested in what's going on back there anyway. There's some evidence to suggest there's no such thing as the past or the future, only the present.
As a kid, you don’t really know how swings work. You just move your legs and you get higher and higher. You find out later, regarding the swing, it’s because you are using your momentum through gravity, generating centripetal force to be exact, which creates a back and forth motion. But, for now, on that playground, your sister is swinging next to you and she laughs and yells, Higher! Higher!
The plump pastor looks down at you and smiles. You are dead. You lay in your cream-colored casket, on a bed of scarlet silks and smile back, all satisfied like.
"I loved reading Exit, Carefully. It’s unusual, and in my opinion exciting, to publish a play without previously receiving a major production."
-Walker Caplan, Lithub
“Lutz’s work is a marvel of the possibilities of language. Each of her sentences is an intricately crafted thing, deeply complex yet crystalline in its clarity . . . her command of each and every word remains supreme.”
--Mira Braneck, The Paris Review Daily
Garielle Lutz is the author of The Complete Gary Lutz, among other books.
"[Her Lesser Work] is a collection of mordant and formally inventive stories circling themes of, let’s say, desire and escape within repressive structures."
-Walker Caplan, Literary Hub
"Her Lesser Work is full of power and it takes risks and it's alive and real and it fixes a very sharp eye on the shit humans do to each other and themselves."
-Lindsay Lerman, LitReactor
