WILLIAM LESSARD / LOVER

July 07, 2026 / Always Crashing

Today, I am killing him again. I kill him on the stairs and when I drop my token in the slot and between cars on the subway. The hammer is new, with a price tag looped around its head. It makes a breeze at my ear when I squeeze the handle and pull b

My lover is made of years I can never finger. Her parents slipped her between two suitcases to escape Castro. She was 16. Two years later, father and mother on the stoop of the foster family, crying between suitcases of their own. “I was their packa

Her lips are soft. Press back against mine with “Os” behind the teeth. My lips only hold “Ts” and “Ks” and all the consonants of curses.

Walking to the Avenue for two slices and a Coke, I am still inside, crushed against people you have known all your life. I learned early on the best way to get back to the stoop was being funny. Being funny, telling jokes. It was a passport. It was

When someone asks about going to school in the city, I tell them, “The subway is my Harvard and my Yale.” When I’m not feeling like a wiseass, I say I’m glad I’m going there, which is true and a lie that chews with its mouth open.  Thursday ev

My father is three miles away, in a bed by the window. A plastic bag forked to a pole threads fluid into his wrist. The fluid drips into a well at the bottom of the bag, a clear tube curls down and over the covers and around, to the underside of his

It’s Thursday. The day we see each other. Our ritual began in August. With a postcard from Spain. On one side of the postcard, people in bathing suits running toward the ocean. On the other, looping green script, it said we should get together for c

Every night at dinner, my father cannot grip the lid tight enough to turn it. I want to help him. I want to smash the jar against his skull. Most nights he gives up. Tonight, he hammers on. Face red, curses bubbling at his lips. On the eleventh try,

All white. Straight. A perfect line that waited for words to be written along it. The only line I knew was carved at my grandmother’s shoulder. It began at the bone, knifed down and around where her left breast had been. The operation was in April,

William Lessard is the author of /face (KERNPUNKT Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, McSweeney's, Lit Hub, The Seneca Review, Fence, and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the Poetry & Hybrids editor at Heavy Feather Review. More about him can be found at www.williamlessardwrites.net.

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