Two Poems

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.