Emily Loftis
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Skinbag of bones
at a backchurch graveyard,
where we drove to
fuck, while bruised December sits low
over your loose tongued
’85 Toyota
You are Adam
I am an Adam
too.
And next to my window, a church lawn holds the sign,
LIVE! YOU ARE GOD’S CHILDREN
over Trinity’s Christmas nativity,
hushholding
still
it’s nightly creatures
like crude moonbaby dreams,
dim in the light of plastic eyes;
Mother, Joseph, and Child
awake in the snow.
But I don’t know
if their redemption can find us,
can soothe the spaces
between our limbs contorting in your car;
escaping their eclipsed battery forms,
the coils of plastic eyes
now pooling light
upon our fallen
Adam tangles.
My hand
is on your arm,
my hand is on your
zipper,
I find you
to enter
the garden
as if our reprise never happened.
You are reborn
you are reborn
you are reborn
you are reborn
you are reborn
you are reborn
you are reborn
now
Fractures of rapture in our boughs,
under the coarse candescence
shed from infant Jesus onto
ribbons of muscle, tendons
and sinews
of your body
on top of my body,
bold as brutality.
And it is only then, as
it is finished,
when you wipe your thumb
against my passenger window,
that I see new
through the steam of holy water,
read new the church sign’s message
rupturing dark against all the white
of snow,
of skin, and your
Celica.
Black lettering which once was
LIVE! YOU ARE GOD’S CHILDREN
has been rearranged, so that when I read
GOD EVIL CHILDREN YOU ARE!
I think that it’s true,
oh God, I think that it’s true and want to
cry or maybe
pray or
laugh
and instead,
grab my winter coat
from the backseat
tucking you in it
as though to cover you,
wrap you
as in swaddling clothes.
The lights of the
nativity scene flicker up
as dusk trails around us,
baby Jesus, cold
blind irises open under the black script.