By Jonathan Everitt
Don’t look now at the clock tower,
the hour hand won’t tell you what
the gargoyles know about the
cloudless sky—our well’s running dry.
Black crude extracted, set ablaze—
Don’t look now at the clock tower
to gauge our notion of progress,
Excelsior! skyscrapers cry.
This is the hour we should dread:
the next bell chimes for rainless cloud.
Don’t look now at the clock tower
as walls of water start to rise.
World’s largest parking lot? The sea’s
great garbage patch will welcome us.
And how much time to change our ways?
Don’t look now at the clock tower.
Sanctuary
Some inner sanctums waft mildewed pews and
the bittersweet phosphorous of spoiled rose perfume.
But here, the fabric softener blooms from my
freshly laundered corduroy and Fruit of the Loom.
Five-drawered dresser stuffed with size 10
socks; shelf ablaze with Judy Blume.
The chamber’s papered walls peel back from plaster,
sloughing like the skin of a long-gone resident whose
god died, too—perhaps buried in the backyard garden
beside other rodents someone loved enough to name.
A toy box entombs a creature who awaits the
son’s return, but he isn’t coming back for them, not soon.
Instead, my stereo sings praise to adolescent idolatry,
its abominable Madonna knew exactly what to coo.
Gloria Galactica
Ours was not the only Genesis.
Across the universe, 19 sextillion
earth-like planets circle sun-like stars.
How many Trees of Knowledge
have we eaten of since then?
How many driven from how many Edens?
How many only sons of God?
How many chutes and ladders
now scaffold this preposterous
expanse of space and time?
Somewhere on another fallen Earth,
unto Others is born this day
in their City of David a savior whose
cross will grow from alien wood,
whose stone will lock his tomb with
different gravity beneath a bold, red sun.
And in his aftermath a church will rise,
splinter like an asteroid-thrashed moon,
subdue its planet, consume its host,
burn every village to save it.
Wherever there’s a garden,
you’ll find a serpent, too.
Jonathan Everitt’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Frozen Sea, Shift, Moon City Review, Bare Hill Review, Laurel Review, BlazeVox, Impossible Archetype, Ghost City Press, and the Moving Images poetry anthology, among others. Jonathan has also led a workshop for LGBTQ poets and co-founded the long-running monthly open mic, New Ground Poetry Night. Jonathan earned his MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. He lives in Rochester, N.Y., with his partner, David Sullivan.