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ISSUE III

Natasha Bredle

JESUS WANTS TO GO TO VENUS

& I would follow Him there.

I open my mouth & a thing comes out.

I open my mouth & rocket back to earth.

Don’t look at my landing ground.

Don’t look at the shape space left in my wake.

The porch spanned kilometers, & still I missed.

My mother sent signals through the night

& still I missed, flares devolving into a steady

stream of sound worth nothing in a vacuum,

a silent grave. Until the breath came back,

& with it my voice, & with it a feeling of having

something important to say without knowing

how to say it. My hands cupped what I hoped

to be a testimony, but what I was told was a

mistake, an error in the processing that caused

such a long long time between lift off

& touch down, a post-requisite bridge to a song

I can’t pin the lyrics to. If only I could put it

to a pretty tune, the way Elton John sings

on a Christmas Day, when the New York Times

said God is dead & the war’s begun—if only

I could win this war. If only I could coax

my battle wounds into a crown.

Jesus wants to go to Venus, & I

would follow Him there, if only my helmet

would stay strapped on & not drift away from me

like it did before. Like it always does. I know

I’ll never be reborn a pauper to a pawn,

but here on earth I take a new form.

In the dirt I take a new form.

Natasha Bredle is an emerging writer based in Cincinnati. Her work has been featured in publications such as Words and Whispers, The Lumiere Review, and The Madrigal. She has received accolades from the Bennington College Young Writers Awards as well the Adroit Prizes. In addition to poetry and short fiction, she has a passion for longer works and is currently drafting a young adult novel.

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