i think of the flood
and the God who found need for it a mere eight chapters after there was light.
his certainty we’d keep faith even knowing we’d once been drowned;
of the gravity of those sins (censored) demanding our extermination (explicit.)
i think of the flood and the men who recorded it then;
a mass mercy killing at the hand of the all-righteous.
his singular solution set in a foreground of choicelessness,
framed by curtains of irredeemability, of future promise.
i think of God establishing a covenant never to destroy all life again
by flood,
an immaterial concession,
his chest full, his fingers crossed,
his strategy ripe for the mimicking.
and i think of those record keeper's ancestors,
how they're documenting our time right now.
whose unimpeachable evils they're scrying can be excised in no other way
whose absolutely necessary evolutionary era have i found myself born into
reading the history books eons from here
they'll be satisfied -
the good guy definitely won out in the end, that's for sure,
but
they're all damn glad they weren't around to have to survive it.
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genesis.
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idolatry.
You're sure you're not in love with me
she says with her eyes, nonchalantly,
a woman accustomed to asking.
they glint green just around the rim
some verdant ancestor refusing to die.
she tilts her head, furrows her brow, repeats
"You're sure you won't come with me?"
words swollen with entendre, you’re convinced
her hair backlit and sparkling,
"virgin" she's joked, never once dyed.
she kisses your cheek in departure,
wants to get back to the way our parents generation did it.
daunting,
the cliff of her jaw
the curve of her shoulder
all not nearly near enough;
haunting,
too many of your days,
inexorable from your nights,
this ghost who hasn't even died.
rule breaker, you think,
no,
rewriter,
carving them as she goes in gold,
a lightning strike, a mountain in smoke,
consummate impossibility.
where were you before this
lost
or worse, complacent
what were you before this
a dissident
an infidel
now
a man with a living exodus -
perhaps no better off, no closer to salvation,
but at least renewed in belief.
a heretic
commanded testily back to the faith.
-
typical.
the sun is out
my father digs in the garage for some passed-down or possibly over-borrowed yard tool
my mother preempts her cooking with asterisks and winces
my brother breezes in as my husband sneaks inside jokes into another conversation
we laugh at it all
the surety of the impossibly perfect gadget buried somewhere in those steel chest drawers
the richness of the excellent meal, the ridiculousness of her apologies
the way the weatherman gets off scot-free even when he's plumb wrong
today there'd been no bad drivers on our roads
no cells dividing imperfectly (to the best of our knowledge)
our old dog runs underfoot, scolded for nearly toppling visitors
the visitors still come
they're all still here
-
portrait of miranda albert henry collings 1909
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American values.
justice stands slack-jawed and stymied.
temperance storms off.
hope and faith break into a screaming match,
drowning charity's sobs.
prudence folds her hands,
purses her lips,
knows her sisters,
their sacrifices - ritual, cyclical, sometimes strategic but often shoddy.
their brothers have grown unwieldly of late.
her eyes land on fortitude.
the room silences in the weight of decision.
they return to themselves, encircle her, this patron saint of last stands,
nothing left to do in the face of such deadly sin
but to simply go on.
-
hindsight:
interj. a patchy grey bruise on a pristine white page; the audible splintering of ice in warm water; a red helium balloon tied to a toddlers wrist, stark against the serene sky
-
even more ado.
i am a cat surrounded by gotten tongues,
struggling to herd myself.
every wanderer greets me disoriented, the lot of us,
pillared by the impulse to look back,
borrowing against time's already threadbare rope.
i reach the end of mine.
so i set out, sore eyed, scorching each bridge i cross.
a little bird tells me to see a man about a dog having his day;
i find him barking a chased goose up the wrong tree.
i disentangle a horse from a cart to get a good look in its mouth.
is it a gift? or just the straight truth - a reminder to be grateful
that this horse isn't beaten dead like the last one?
i burn all the oil trying to build a two-ended candle;
dig up the hatchet when i notice the chickens' numbers have dwindled.
my empire is small enough that i watch every sun set,
biting the bullet out of pity for the barreled crab.
high water hasn't come, this much i know for certain.
can't be as sure about hell.
i try to be deliberate in my deliberations -
to talk about timing at times quite unlike these.
they tell me
a watched pot never boils but boy
it'd sure be nice to feel your cup runneth over;
that Rome wasn't built in a day but my,
it'd sure be nice to build something
wouldn't it
-
haikyou vi.
longing, you re-read these;
strained, uncontrolled, ’til something
that isn’t feels real.
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on the precipice of doom.
in my mind we sit on the stoop
always quiet and comfortable and together
peer across the precipice between our worlds - his i’ll join eventually
and mine which he could no longer stand.
we sit inside the weight of all that i cannot know
in all that he's missed since
and we wonder of one another's dooms.
i try to find a verb for his - wanted? felt? did?
he finds he is not envious of the complexities of mine.
in my world i move to sit on the roof, circle "the precipice of doom" on a sheet of paper
i think of the way the cortisol flood must feel so similar between someone focusing the scope of their gun and someone waiting for the perfect moment to grab a person before they jump -
the way a trigger and a shirt tail can somehow feel the same in the body.
are we already there, on the precipice of doom?
if not individually certainly collectively,
what's another inch.
a frog allows itself to be boiled, slowly.
there are no poems
only things that are real that find a way to remind us of ourselves.
i think about how jumping and shooting another person are in fact two different ways of killing yourself.
how pulling someone back saves you both.
we are already there.
another inch is everything.
musée 