Bob Lucky
Wise Guy
without a sound moonlight slips into the house— a lifetime spent trying to fit in where I don’t belong
“If you were looking for the truth, where would you start?” my partner asked. As an apprentice burglar, I suspected I was being tested. Perhaps truth was slang for treasure. I shrugged to convey both my ignorance and my admiration for the profundity of the question. We went into the bathroom and he flipped through a tattered copy of Bill Peet’s No Such Things and checked to see if the dental floss was scented. In the bedroom he nicked a few jewels out of habit. “What do you think?” he asked. I shrugged again, this time to give the impression I was thinking the same thing he was thinking. We went into the kitchen and he pulled a bread knife out of a drawer and ran a finger, one of mine to be exact, over the heel. I didn’t say anything because I thought this might be some sort of burglars’ blood brother ritual. He laid the knife on the counter and said, “Let’s go. We’ve found it.” “Found what?” I asked. “The truth.” I looked at my finger and was about to ask when he said, “Yes, that’s your cut.”
About the Author
Bob Lucky is the author most recently of My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019) and the chapbook Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), which was a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018. Lucky lives in Portugal, where he is working his way through all the regional cheeses and wines.