Poem of the Week | December 22, 2025

“To Narcan” by Alejandro Lucero is our Poem of the Week.

Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His latest work appears and is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, Southern Review, and Verse Daily. He lives in Baltimore, where he is a Salter Lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and a senior editor for The Hopkins Review. 

To Narcan

For Steven Espada Dawson

The way you idle
a few hums longer

the wing work
of a human heart.

Your half moon,
stop sign, and star

-shaped blocks
filling the blue

sorter toy in the brain.
How you flush

rose petals piling up
inside the lungs.

Dear nasal spray
of second chances,

when I first lived
alone, I was afraid

of all the harm
that might enter

my small apartment,
so my best friend,

who always carries you
in his bag, told me

to pull a sock
over the baseball bat

kept as a secret weapon
beside my front door.

That way, you get one more hit
—his voice a Louisville

Slugger sliding softly
into wool—in case

someone holds on
and won’t let go.

Author’s Note

Steven Espada Dawson, author of Late to the Search Party, once told me he keeps a tourniquet and Narcan in his backpack, “because this is America.” This poem is for the ways we show love to each other by giving great advice; it’s for how we pass on gifts of memory, story, and detail; it’s for art that comes from sharing a fear and closeness to addiction; it’s for the ways we might be given another chance; the ways we make survival happen. I wrote this as an ode to both something that saves lives and someone whose friendship and words have saved mine and many others’.