Sunday, August 13, 2006

War Poem 7 by Jake Berry

Wasp in amber.

Christ's palms in formaldehyde.

The scribes are weeping

in the ruins of their broken vocabulary.



Comes a witch in Canaan

can speak in pure image.

The ground crawls with

maggots when she speaks.



Soldiers and

mortar gun trucks

raid the laboratories

and take the parameter.

They are figures

in a book of prayer

locked in a virus.





Her left hand clutches

the broach of Minerva –

The sea swells

and swallows them all

and the prophets with them.



The grain gone sour

in the monastery stores,

even hallucination

takes its meat and

breathes into the cameras

and satellites



Heaven is empty now

except these leeches

pocked in gravity's curve



falling toward the Capitol

collecting the populace

like teeth.

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