Kurt Luchs

The Woman in the Mirror

The dead are dead, when they’re gone they’re gone,
they cannot return. And yet, sometimes, they do.
Tonight as I was dining with my darling
in our favorite restaurant, I looked up

to see the sweet narrow face of a woman long dead
staring back at me obliquely from the side mirror
on the wall: Andrea Nagy Smith,
not seen on earth since 2012,

dear friend, lover of cats and jokes,
honorary aunt to my two daughters,
how is it you are here this evening
a bit younger than when we first met

in New Haven? Who is this man with you?
Where is the husband you found late in life
after so much time alone, the one
who gave you such brief, intense joy?

What realm have you returned from
and what message do you bring me
other than an overpowering urge to weep?
I don’t know, I don’t know, but I see now

you’ve been alive inside me all this time
as well as in the mirror world
and possibly also in this world
which I could have sworn you had left.

Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. His latest poetry chapbook is The Sound of One Hand Slapping (2022) from SurVision Books (Dublin, Ireland). He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.