- Dumb Luck
When a punch is duckedby a fall-down drunk,
or the bank is brokeby a card shark’s blink,
then you know it’s strucklike the tinny plink
of a rusted clock.Such a timely plink,
and we’re back in swankwith our shamrocks plucked,
with our baskets dunked,with the caromed crack
of a dead-stroke whackand all eight balls sunk. [End Page 151]
Hailey Leithauser is the author of Swoop (Graywolf, 2013), which was awarded the Emily Dickinson First Book Award by the Poetry Foundation. She has recent or upcoming work in the Antioch Review, Poetry, Pleiades, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. In 2014 she will be teaching a workshop, “The Poetry of Things,” at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.