What I Imagine Creation Was Like
The hum of gods working: in the blue room, gods bend water into globes—the old pros sending serpentine creatures to float, dive into saline. Apprentices leave puddles of flopping fish, try to call the water back up.
The garden gods work outside where perfume can diffuse, birth orgy earths—magenta and lime. Peopled with feather boa friends-to-lovers, kissing faces, fingers, feet—it all feels good.
The basement glows red with the gods’ laughter—they lounge on concrete, building cracked clocks, forging people with nerve endings attuned to pain. People who are always cold, stab each other and leave each other, and die in mudslides.
In the greenhouse, oxygenated gods breathe chlorophyll air, charm sprouts out of damp dirt on each orb of earth—bursting fruits, spiral petals, vines climbing trees to the misty canopy.
Upstairs in the grey room, gods balance—borrow blooms that turn bitter in the winter, clouds heavy with sun and sleet. The gods compete: who can set the scales just right? Just enough pain to heighten pleasure. An apprentice displays his contender—mangos and hurricanes, Christmas and genocide. Older gods gather round, ruffle his hair—you’ll do better next time.
Outside the Garden
after Molly McCully Brown
this is the end of the earth
this is the world without God.
He burns the gate, a nightlight when the moon hides
He hides, but He’ll remember this ground
out here, the sky billows and below
our skin bronzes like a shield
the fruit shrivels to seed
the grass prickles
I can almost remember the nectar
from sun-facing flowers
blueberry, fig,
black plum, lover—
forty days of marking dawns in the dirt
until he returns and strawberries quench the dust
falling back into the grass, into your tongue
lover, sugar—
you taste like
* * *
this is the beginning of the world
this is the world after god left it
burning gates taunt from the dark
when the moon disappears
out here, the day blinds, the grass unvelvets,
and our skin turns to scorched orange peel
like we never drank the nectar from sun-facing blooms
pomegranate, cherry, ruby grapefruit, lover—
forty nights I told you stories,
counted backwards to the day we were animated
and the strawberries were almost too sweet
so I picked the green ones
my mouth puckered—clinging,
you kissed the sour out of my tongue
then god sent his spirit down with a match
we tasted bitter, crimson smoke
lover, you taste like smoke
Claire Benevento is a queer writer from Kirksville, Missouri. She is figuring out life post-MFA after graduating from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is the author of the micro-chapbook New Genesis (Ghost City Press, 2023), and her poetry appears in The Tampa Review, Number One Magazine, Rogue Agent, Spry, and Botticelli.