Poem of the Week | May 18, 2026

Nick Lantz is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The End of Everything and Everything That Comes After That (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024). His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Southern Review, the Best American Poetry series, and elsewhere. He lives in Huntsville, Texas, with his wife and cats.

“In the News” by Nick Lantz is our Poem of the Week.

***

In the News

The missile found the café, says the paper,
as if the missile had circled the neighborhood
before parking down the street, fanning out
its fivefold map like some cartoon tourist.
The missile tried to picture the café in its mind:
the place with blue tile and the hung-crooked TV
always playing soccer. Hadn’t the missile
met a friend there just last year? The one who
divorced her husband and threw away
every piece of rabbit-themed jewelry
he’d ever given her—eighteen anniversaries’
worth. The missile could still see the glint
in the rabbit locket’s garnet eyes as she
dangled it above the grounds in her empty
cup. That fucker, she’d said. That fucker.
The missile just wanted a pastry. Something
flaky, seasoned with sesame. The missile
was sweating. It turned this way and that. Then,
the café appeared before it, the door propped
open with a metal bucket full of sand
and cigarette butts. The missile entered
the café. It felt a terrible sadness lift.
It looked at the other patrons: a man
dusting crumbs from his shirt. A woman
with her thumb pressed lightly to another
woman’s wrist. A little boy closing his eyes
as he took his last bite of something sweet.

***

Author’s Note

When political figures or institutions employ a poetics of misdirection to obscure some horrible act, I often have this irritated impulse to try to snatch the language back from them somehow. The particulars of the bombing and its victims described in this poem are fictional, but I based the phrase in the poem’s first line on a similarly worded New York Times headline (now over a decade old) about an Israeli missile strike in Gaza, so that was certainly in my mind when I was writing this.