Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, Lucky Charms: New and Selected Poems 2000-2025

 

LUCKY CHARMS

It is midafternoon. You are adrift
My head flutters with smiles of the dead
My heart aches. Rain let up
for a brief spell of warmth. More
to come tomorrow. Atmospheric river
sweeps in before we sent it south, where
people are drowning sorrows in drink. Drunk
as a way of living. It could be midafternoon
when the sky shifts to share, a banjo rips
A neighbor is dead. His smile keeps me
company in the process of grief. We prepare
for rain with buckets to catch the drops
from a grand hole up above. In the cloud
formations I can see his teeth and legs
He was all teeth and legs. It is midafternoon
There is a banjo. And a hole

I’ve been curious about seeing further work by San Francisco poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux for some time, and the first book I’ve properly got my hands on is her Lucky Charms: New and Selected Poems 2000-2025 (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2026), a title that appears as “City Lights Spotlight No. 24.” Part of what I’ve been appreciating in the City Lights Spotlight Series is two-fold: seeing selected poems by those one might think obvious candidates alongside a further list of those who have been publishing for a while, but not necessarily by publishers in the mainstream trade. For example, Thibodeaux is the author of numerous titles, but not necessarily those you might have caught through bookstore shelves: Curves & Curses (Auguste Press, 2000), Last We Spoke (Auguste Press, 2004), 20/20 Yielding (Blue Press, 2005), Room Service Calls (Lew Gallery Editions, 2008), Palm To Pine (Bootstrap Productions, 2011), 88 Haiku for Lorca (Push, 2013), As Water Sounds (Bootstrap Productions, 2014), Universal Fall Precautions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Witch Like Me (The Operating System, 2020), The World Exactly (Cuneiform Press, 2020) and Broadway Azaleas (FMSBW, 2024). Her audience-to-date, most likely, a combination of those-in-the-know and regional, a consideration she most likely shares with further titles in the same series by San Francisco poets, such as Patrick James Dunagan’s City Bird and Other Poems (City Lights Books, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Evan Kennedy’s METAMORPHOSIS (City Lights Books, 2023) [see my review of such here]. The series, then, suggests itself as paying full attention to those local writers deserving of a wider and further attention. In the back of the collection, offering that the series “SHINES A LIGHT ON THE WEALTH OF INNOVATIVE AMERICAN POETRY BEING WRITTEN TODAY. WE PUBLISH ACCOMPLISHED FIGURES KNOWN IN THE POETRY COMMUNITY AS WELL AS YOUNG EMERGING POETS, USING THE CULTURAL VISIBILITY OF CITY LIGHTS TO BRING THEIR WORK TO A WIDER AUDIENCE. IN DOING SO, WE ALSO HOPE TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THOSE SMALL PRESSES PUBLISHING SUCH AUTHORS,”

LAST NIGHT’S DREAM

I had French toast
with Tim Dlugos, his hands
trembling from meds
lenses reflecting back
at me myself. It was hard
to tell, but he spoke
sensical hand-me-downs
and that’s how I knew—
like recognizing chords
in the newest band’s rip-offs
skyrockets landing on hillsides
fresh whipped cream, strawberries
black coffee. done. with errors
on the page

Thibodeaux writes first-person declarative bursts that offer the occasional abstract sheen, yet provide a foundation of concrete specifics. There are ways her narratives are composed of individual bricks of seemingly self-contained phrases and stragglers, pulling apart lines there and here, sliding up against a kind of narrative collision and accumulation. “There are fragile things in the sky / All miners are above ground,” she writes, as part of the extended “from AGAINST WHAT LIGHT,” “They sent down the Virgin Mary with food / City Hall is orange / and the moon has gone from crescent / There were seven phone calls / with no one on the line [.]” It is as though her poems are set as large canvases, and the brush strokes of her lines can move in any direction, any colour, all purposefully set within the same poem’s boundaries. And still, her poems hold the intimacy of little monologues, sharp with phrases and line breaks, precise and casual in their execution. As she writes, as part of “from UNIVERSAL FALL PRECAUTIONS”: “The gossip was of a boy / I protested. Wanting / only proof of / the misinformation. Who / defines these categories?”