My Personal Favorite with Michael Lauchlan
A Poetry Blog
Hi Everyone!
This poetry blog only asks the poet one two-part question: At this moment in time, which of your poems is your personal favorite, and why?
Cheers,
Kelly
Michael Lauchlan
Landing
If the back stairs of the old flat
constitute a gray container for time,
my father still snoring on the upper porch
and the downstairs tenant cursing from her kitchen
and me both 10 years old
and 70, suspended on a landing between,
maybe the onions and potatoes and meat
no longer simmering but now
annealed to a pot my father
has forgotten on the stove,
maybe that stench that really can’t
be called a cooking smell mixes
with the ash of a house fire of a store
burning of the latest bombs falling
and films my tongue even when I laugh,
and maybe everyone I pass crossing
the busiest street is carrying a stairway
and if we could see them teetering
like Chaplin’s stacked up burdens
in manic silent movies, we might
wonder how traffic ever gets past
such tangles of stringers and treads
such clouds of falling soot.
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Michael:
Maybe all poems create "containers for time." This one foregrounds the effort, pulling together a remembered childhood place (the back stairs of an old flat) and some fragments of the history that have fallen on us more recently. I hope, in the end that the poem turns a compassionate gaze outward, evoking a sense that we are all carrying a lot on our comically frail frames.
Bio:
Michael Lauchlan has contributed to many publications, including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, Louisville Review and Poet Lore and Poetry Ireland. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from WSU Press (2015).
Lauchlan's work has been reprinted in American Life in Poetry and Writer's Almanac. "When the War" was awarded the 2011 Consequence Prize for Poetry. His poems have been included in anthologies from Wayne State University Press, Oxford Press, and (forthcoming) Michigan State University Press.
***
A little about your host:
KELLY FORDON's latest poetry collection, What Trammels the Heart, was published by SFAPress in 2025. She is the author of a short story collection, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020), another poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019), and a novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, (WSUP, 2015.) She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she also runs a fiction podcast called “Let's Deconstruct a Story.” http://www.letsdeconstructastory.substack.com.
PS: What Trammels the Heart is on sale right now for 40% off at tamupress.com with the code HEART40 :) and Amazon here.
I have paused subscriptions because this blog is supporting Inside Out Literary Arts from March 2025 to April 2026, and it is easier for those who want to support this blog AND that worthy cause to make donations directly to them here.
(Please let Inside Out know that Kelly Fordon sent you because I've made the crazy promise to raise $5000 over the next three years and every penny counts. Yikes!)
***
For more Michael Lauchlan poems, you can find his Substack here:
