by Mark Alan Williams
God works nights along a broad highway, lining the dead like split deer along its shoulders. In the cold he sweats. Steam rises over the wet carnage of bodies he once stitched together. Ligaments to bones, valves to ventricles. Tonight he pauses weaving rough hands through the hair of a woman, palms finding her cheeks, scrapes her lips with his like shards of heaven on a broken jar. Tomorrow he will be the dirt that loves her again. Everything is breaking open. We are ripe everything is bright and swollen with diasporic organelles and minerals making you & me taste like every morning we’ve breathed in. Underground all the soldiers and brokers and biker gangs gossips and piano teachers break open like sparklers in streams of red and white. They were bodies God knit together then pressed apart with slow dirt. We, too, are bodies knit together like that. We will be pressed apart. When one of us is laid along the roadside We will feel this pressure to disintegrate & may have doubts or hopes about a resurrection.
We’ll get wishful, revisionist, emergent. Here, we’ll realize, we are as we’ve always been grains away from oceanic, you & I & tracing our how vast progress, our past and future throats to a bucket of concrete, of tar, of salt. Arms’ weight to a wet summer night, bones to river silt, fingertips to glaciers, skulls to a reddening sink. Skin sent to a paper factory; tongues pressed into yard signs, collarbones, light bulbs, ear lobes; minds distilled down to a glaze of polymer on glass. And we’ll pray, flat as pine needles, to the God the Church for us the people. Fold back Your hands & clap us back together if only to dangle there two rafter bats in the echoless vastness of Your sanctuary.
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