ISSUE III

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.