Skip the Tragic Films
The other night, while I slept heavy,
you heard a killing in the yard
and in the morning found a tangle
of fur and bones in the flowers.
Our beloved who scratches the evening
window to hunt will not be allowed
to be her biochemistry
nor join the drama.
The autumn theater’s now
playing an echo of October, the trees
folding a good hand at the first frost.
What might have been is never shown.
Instead, bad choices lead the best of us
to ruin. That’s what we won’t choose.
There is enough suffering outside
any time we want to see it.
Max Heinegg is the author of Good Harbor (2022), which won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize, Going There (2023), the chapbook Keepers of the House (2025), and At the Art of War (forthcoming, fall 2026), all on Lily Poetry Review Press.
His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Thrush, Matter, Nimrod, and The Cortland Review, among others.
He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, the 2025 Boston Music Award for Spoken Word, won the Sidney Lanier poetry prize the Emily Stauffer poetry prize, and been a finalist for the poetry prizes of Crab Creek, Asheville Poetry Review, Twyckenham Notes, Rougarou, and Nazim Hikmet.
He has taught English in the public schools of Medford, MA for 28 years and is poet-laureate of the city of Medford, 2025-2027.
