Work | Michael Lauchlan

Available Sep. 2026

Running Lights

“Running Lights is a sweet balm; a consoling tributary, gentling through a world that, like a torrent, so often threatens to sweep us away… Lauchlan is a poet adept at locating the holy in the mundane, …offering a vision of a world not entirely devoid of regret, yet never undone by it either.”

– Kelly Fordon
Author of What Trammels the Heart

“Lauchlan reminds us that we are always in-between, always falling under Earth’s gravity, but also that this is not entirely a tragedy… Knowledge hard-won at a Detroit dinner table; along the city’s rivers; and in its alleyways, jazz clubs, and truck yards. In their tender attentiveness and gem-like clarity, these poems uproot and swirl me. In their humble poignancy and proximity to song, these poems leave me standing up and singing along.”

– Stacy Gnall
Author of Dogged

“Lauchlan’s voice is a resonant, steady guide even against the murkiness of memory. This open-hearted collection is unflinching.“

– Alise Alousi
Author of What to Count

Published 2015

Trumbull Ave.

Purchase at WSU Press

The well-crafted lines in Michael Lauchlan’s Trumbull Ave. are peopled by welders, bricklayers, gas meter readers, nurses, teachers, cement masons, and street kids. Taken together, they evoke a place—Detroit—in its bustling working-class past and changeable present moment. Lauchlan works in the narrative tradition of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson but takes more recent influence from Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, and Ellen Voigt in presenting first- and third-person meditations on work, mortality, romance, childish exuberance, and the realities of time.

Lauchlan’s poems reveal the layered complexity of human experiences in vivid, relatable characters and recurrent themes that feel both familiar and serious. All readers of poetry will enjoy the musical and vivid verse in Trumbull Ave.

Trumbull Ave. can be purchased through WSU Press and many neighborhood booksellers.

“Trumbull Ave. is a brilliant book—read it aloud and it will sing for you.“

– Thomas Lux

Featured Works

Ascent – Interstices

The Summerset Review – Grandchild & Final Exam

Matter – Unarmed

Valparaiso Poetry Review – Midway

The Punch – Nights and other poems

Off the Coast – Letter

Barnstorm – Erratics

Innisfree – Petrichor

Sisyphus – Blackboard

Solstice

It was the month of wildfires in the year
of heat. It was the summer of baseball
and the year they returned from Spain–

the fascists–from Italy and Chile, from Germany,
from the thirties, the seventies, from wherever
they are stored between times, perhaps

with bacteria in our small intestines,
with mitochondria in every cell. These
were weeks devoted to hating outsiders.

Through my granddaughters’ and my grandson’s summer,
a demagogue rang and Venezuelans slugged
long homers for the home team

while mothers in Caracas faced bullets
and looted groceries. Things made no sense
to us, but things never seem to mind.

It was the month wildfires swallowed
the west, while fireflies lit up
my darkening yard and, against dusk,

distant poplars bristled in a wind
like throngs of people boarding boats
and waving toward us one last time.

(featured in Tar River Poetry)
After the Election, Reading with Students

Between what is and what will come,
we read Ajax aloud–the old, dazed,
blood-spattered grief, the shame lit
in a day’s new light. A young man,

blinking through his glasses, shapes
the wail a hero makes when he learns
what madness and a deity have wrought
in his riven home. The light of a warm

November fills the classroom. Windows
frame red and gold leaves on half-bare
oaks. Again, Tecmessa covers the body.

Again, a brother demands funeral rites,
a grave, some way to restore
one sundered in a shattered land.

(featured in Crab Creek Review)
Bats Where I Worked

When the bats came through their end
of St. Francis Home, where one boy
playing an endless game of eight ball
raised a cue before I could speak
and plucked the bat from the air,
he turned a quick, nearly invisible thing
into a falling towel, into a small mophead
dropping from a hook with a dull thud,
into a folded leathery lump to be scooped
with a dustpan into whatever can was close.
The game might be going on still,
rack by rack, unless he finally snapped and lifted
a cue ball right into the face of some
later, meaner version of me. Or the boy
might have sunk into his own hollow chest
and been lowered, maybe with taps and flag,
maybe in a cheap box with no one at all
standing sadly by, and his last thoughts
–as thought arcs backward toward a ground–
might have leapt to a gray, falling form.

(featured in The Louisville Review)
Denied Entry to a Prison

for a writers’ group, I fidget
in a molded plastic seat.

Wait-listed to get inside a place
everyone wants to leave, I stare

across the room at a thin woman,
who’s brushed her long hair,

put on her best blouse and driven
fifty miles. Now she perches

on a blue chair, waiting to get
patted and probed, to walk through

glass doors that hum open
and close again. I smile at her

like the vacant fool I am.
A middle-aged couple emerges

from the sliding doors. They ask
questions at the desk, then huddle

together conferring. A prisoner rolls
a mop-bucket into the john.

Everything is quite routine.
Men in our group spend decades

waiting out parole boards.
A name is called and the lithe woman

strides toward the barrier.
I’m watching. I’m not watching. I’m

reading. I’m checking the clock.
Almost an hour now. Locked up

as a teen, a man in our group
has been inside one hundred

ninety two thousand seven
hundred and twenty hours.

The couple sidles toward an exit
after an hour with a boy

who once ran the point
on his eighth grade team.

(featured in Poet Lore)
Histories

In the gym we’re all bodies, young
and shapely or older, adiposed,
rolling over waistbands through
taut shirts that advertise bars
and past years of beer league
softball. But these, love,
don’t answer to our touch
or stretch out alongside, known,
familial, somehow possessed.
During today’s loud regimen
on the line of treadmills, not
a single sweating skin-cell retains,
vestigial, my August football drills.
Sliding across the parking lot,
none of these feet recalled
your frozen college commutes,
loafers soaked as you stamped,
shifted, shook at a bus stop.
Our bodies are libraries, the real
histories we don’t forget, a flinch
we can’t mask (though threats
lie cold in cold earth) a scar,
a knob where none should be.
Even our tears, called by what
sweetness–some loopy, kind
student who knew chivalry, code
and etymology, how it came
from a pack horse, a beast,
a body carrying bodies, this first
non-aggression pact. I hope
he graduated. I hope to Christ
I gave the kid a pass.

(featured in Miramar)
Unarmed

Why will I recount this for you,
fluent waitress bringing me pad
thai in the corner noodle shop?

How my father passed on only
empty-handed rage, having lost,
after Guadalcanal, all taste

for carnage, how I missed out
entirely on guns, how I see a guy
from fifty yards, in gray sweats,

looking like a thief about to pop
a door lock, and I trot up to find
this devout soccer dad who just

wants quiet as he faces east
kneeling between parked cars.
And we laugh. But if I,

lapsed pacifist, eluded the draft
and dodged a war, you did not.
An infant born near a firefight,

you could be immaterial as steam
rising from imagined broth. I long
to touch your delicate hands.

(featured in Matter Monthly)
Negotiations

Each word opening like
an old style map we drag out
of the glove box in the dark,
how will we speak to each other

of our simplest hopes, or of those
who bore us–not whole, not
from their foreheads? Years ago,
we tore off a roof as a storm blew up.

We cussed and spread our tarps.
When it cleared, our pounding resumed
its relentless, desperate prosody.

We sang hoarse Motown, balanced
plywood, shingles, and car notes
to stay ahead of the rain.

We’ve met the enemy and he looks
like we would if we’d first
been dipped in gold, though
he might be more than kin.

For not offering up my limbs
to the lush Vietnam forest,
I’ve been pardoned. I never saw
how quickly a life ebbs

when a leg is blown off.
I know how it ebbs here
where many limp on, “bootless,

blood-shod” or struggle to recall
a bright word for the last
bored few who’ll listen.

(featured in Sugar House Review)