The god you failed to name still waits up there,
His emerald cloak a gesture: thin, absurd.
The silence drums your feet. You never heard
the prayer being mocked now in the air.
The glass admits a counterfeit of skies,
a fractured sun dissolving into haze.
The incense claws your throat and cons your eyes.
The fog recalls forgotten, wasted days.
The pews consume you, wood against the bone,
as angels hum a hymn too sweet, too far.
Their robes are frayed. Their tired wings are stone.
They rise like smoke behind an altar scar.
Above them hangs a Christ with shuttered gaze.
Half-candled light corrodes His plaster face.
The floor pulls down, magnetic in its praise.
The shrine devours. You kneel. You keep your place.
by A. Z. Foreman
A. Z. Foreman is a linguist, poet, short story author, and/or translator pursuing a doctorate at the Ohio State University. His work has been featured in the Threepenny Review, Rattle, ANMLY, Poet Lore, and elsewhere, including two people’s tattoos, but not yet the Starfleet Academy Quarterly or Tattooine Monthly. He writes from the edge of thought between sleep and waking. He wants to pet your dog.
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