Justin Lacour

I don’t know if this is important, but in the concert film Hard to Handle, Bob Dylan begins a show by taunting his audience. Everybody’s got their own hero. I don’t know who your hero is. Maybe Mel Gibson? Michael Jackson? Bruce Springsteen? This was 1986. Then Dylan says I’m gonna sing you about my hero now, and launches into a blistering version of “In the Garden,” a song about Christ at Gethsemane. I’m not speculating on Dylan’s faith. That’s not the point. I just wish I was always on fire like that. I mean inspired, faithful, and a little confrontational. I remember nights after the hurricane, drinking warm beer in the dark, browsing websites on my phone that didn’t offer any answers, other than flesh. And I don’t make this up for art, but can’t explain how it happened, except to say, one time, after a stroke video, the next video in my feed was a prayer for souls fallen away, and if this was a sign, it was a sign I didn’t want and tried to negotiate away, but You meant the prayer for me. Six billion years ago, You dreamed up a chair for me to sit here in the city’s brunch corridor. Secret chapel, crucifix and mother with the face of a doll. When I came back, looking for You, I prayed for fire and there was no feeling, but then the feeling of being six-years-old again in my backyard, watching trees in the distance, the tree shaped like an upright grizzly, like it was waiting to march Godzilla-style through my subdivision. That electric fear and excitement, hoping it would come; it
was taller than my house, ready to level anything in its way, just for me.


Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. He is the author of five chapbooks of poems, including Hulk Church (Belle Point Press 2023).