Poem of the Week | October 19, 2026

W. M. Lobko’s poetry, interviews, and reviews have been published in journals such as Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Washington Square, Boston Review, and Guernica. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been a semi-finalist for the 92Y/Boston Review Discovery Prize. He studied at the University of Oregon and teaches north of New York City. Read more at wmlobko.com.

“I Was Braver Than I Thought” by W. M. Lobko is our Poem of the Week.

***

I Was Braver Than I Thought

Cave of the crook of my arm.
Slick heat of my breath on the desk
Lysol would lift away. Only lately having learned
the ghosts that would wake me at 2 a.m.
could be facts, germs in the chrome of the toy green motorcycle
I dropped in the toilet, say,
or the high twist in my mother’s voice
when she learned her mother was dead. It was like
the high E-flat of a bough breaking,
song I was then decades from singing.
I was architect of an ice planet. I was a skull
hearing itself with every graham cracker’s
ashen reverberation. Sounds such as the walls
could keep back, at least that’s what I imagined,
model spaceships in grey plastic
richly smelling of ozone under the armature light I
aimed so relentlessly, faithful
nothing would melt or erupt. The one fight
we caught my mother & father having
so heinous the sitcom characters stopped to watch,
axe through the bucket klieg lights,
axe through the snowbound door, axe through
the umbilical. Still, I loved space,
how inaccessible it was, its famous silence, how
the ships crisscrossing it started out pristine
then of a sudden were blast-scored, emphysemic
buckets of bolts
prayer could hold together.

***

Author’s Note:

At first, I thought this poem was about my family, my parents, me—but I’ve come to see it more as a devotional of sorts to the stories & myths that help us make meaning, whatever they might happen to be.