THREE POEMS

Madeleine Jennings

The god from the video

It was morning underground. The baby coughed. His mother coughed in fur. Three hovering women fanned away. And the lord said something, but everyone was on the phone. That child was available to the revelation, and it resembled a program he had seen. His vocabulary, limited as it was to household nouns and grunts, struggled to absorb the inscrutable omen. Only a few days later, when in line to receive their final judgment, did he reveal to his mother what he had heard. Clarity befell the boy who uttered his one allotted sentence: “Wherever god could sigh, raise the question.” Yet he mistook the divine flame for the image from the television, and a blush crept across his cheeks as he approached the god from the video.

Eden

I saved the newspaper on the day we were married
I covered the bill and kept the receipt
I stacked the letters, a teetering mountain
I traced the arêtes of extended deceit
I bargained for another go
I tendered my body among other debts
I abandoned my post at the gates of devotion
I returned to its holster my final threat
I withdrew to the left side of our hill
I lay in a valley, cooled my right hand in a lake
I watched light crawl behind our yellowing contracts
I thanked them for the afternoon shade

Lull

When the ceiling
flaked and the proximate
few tapped their spoons
on glass reaching for the dregs
the years and jumping
line the halls of the old building
the motion bends the floor above
which squeaks over the eating
heads breathing through their mouths
completing tedious seat work
counting to the nearest end
when they are released into
the afternoon and down
the tunnel that sends them
away and back again this time
tomorrow they will do it all again

Madeleine Jennings is a writer in New York.