Tracy Royce
Tracy Royce is a poet and writer with work appearing or forthcoming in The Mackinaw, MacQueen’s Quinterly, ONE ART, and Best Microfiction (2026). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and a Touchstone Award. She lives in Southern California, but you can find her on Bluesky.
The following work is Copyright © 2026, and owned by Tracy Royce and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
You Have Never Met Me, Because I Have Dreamt You
…………………………………………………(a Richard Brautigan cento)
I.
Fifty years from now you will
fuck me like fried potatoes
over and over again.
Afterwards we are always embarrassed.
II.
Night again,
there’s a moth in the room.
The question is: Do I want
pajamas on?
Restless,
I think about, perhaps even mourn,
wondering where the fuck-
robot likes to sleep.
* “You Have Never Met Me, Because I Have Dreamt You” appeared in print in Ink in Thirds. Each line (title included) in this cento is sourced from a different poem in Richard Brautigan’s 1976 collection, Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork. Punctuation has been altered only at the ends of lines. Source poems: “You Will Have Unreal Recollections of Me”; “The Bottle”; “Fuck Me Like Fried Potatoes”; “A Penny as Smooth as a Star”; “We Meet. We Try. Nothing Happens, But”; “Night”; “A Moth in Tucson, Arizona”; “Right Beside the Morning Coffee”; “It Takes a Secret to Know a ‘Secret’”; “Good Luck, Captain Martin”; “Finding is Losing Something Else”; “At the Guess of a Simple Hello”; “Robot.”
AutoCorrect
Without your help, I cannot spell
silhouette, and yet, Nosferatu
is now moderate, and Robert Culp
has lost his l. He’s just a cup
that cannot hold what’s missing.
After the Interview
Why would you make a good science advisor, Mr. Down?
The job candidate popped his mandible back in place
(the thing was always slipping) and began, Well,
I have an extensive background in archaeology.
When the interview was over, Piltdown Man was sure
the administration would find nobody more qualified.
Robert Lunday
Robert Lunday is the author of Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness, winner of the 2021 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Award published in 2023 by the University of New Mexico Press. Gnome, a lyric essay, was published by Black Sun Lit in 2017. Mad Flights, a collection of short poems, appeared from Ashland Poetry Press in 2002. Lunday lives with his wife, Yukiko, in rural Japan. Visit Robert online here.
The following work is Copyright © 2026, and owned by Robert Lunday and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
American Elegy 1970
I wake up in the back seat of my life to ask
Where am I? by now seven decades
into this road trip starting over every morning,
calved from another fitful sleep;
……………………………………………….for at night
across many thousands of nights
I’ve pulled a difficult map of the world over me,
more complicated than “The Map of the World”
draped forever behind the teacher’s desk
………….when I was a boy, so many teacher’s desks
in so many schools here and abroad, for we were
………….nomads of the imperial forces.
Our classrooms, wherever they were in the world,
always looked like Nebraska, and Teacher
stood pointer in hand in a plain-print dress
or woolen two-piece, or when pregnant,
………….………..loose-gowned and almost floating
………….magically mother-like;
………….………….………..though briefly, stirringly
………….…………after the riots
and our first color TV and in the midst
…………of moonshots,
………….………….………..in leather knee-high boots,
shiny helmet-hair, and the mini-est of miniskirts.
She is always beanstalk-tall in memory
and lovely and stern,
………….………….………..and it was she
whose slender hand pulled down the World.
America was in the center of the map,
America was everything necessary before you knew it,
America was a decorated plate-glass window on itself,
always in the middle of everything;
………….…………thousands of paved miles from sea to sea
………….………….………..was America, transcontinental parking-lot
or landing strip or spaceport-shopping mall,
………….…………most of all
…………best place to bury the bodies.
America unfolding from the Sears catalogue,
America spilling its pavements in all directions,
America with so many lanes into the abyss,
America invading and invaded:
………………………………………….do not ponder it too long,
…………it is another paradox
…………to keep everything gaslit and running.
Drunk Man in the Vanity
We are naked and soft-white and drunk
and don’t know what we desire.
This circumcist’s mark is our one tattoo
but we have blemishes and scars enough.
Then we feel the furry softness
of our bellies and breasts,
then we bewail
the cowardly retreat
of our gums.
Our salt-and-peppered creviced faces
are identical
so the universe is whole.
You are I and I you,
Old Friend and Foe.
From our ancestors come sweet curses
and murderous ballads.
Such lives made ample waste
for rich gardens of melodies!
In our vanity
we sing half-remembered verses.
