For this issue, I returned to a poem I tried to write and rewrite many times in high school. I think it’s finally done.
catherine st. jude likes to think she is doomed
because that would be the most interesting thing about her.
(the second is that her father was a miner before he skipped town. or so she says. it makes him
seem like a tragic hero with a rusty pickaxe,
a walking symbol of dusty appalachian dreams.
but he wasn’t. he was only an accountant for the big mining company in town.
every time she hears a car horn
she thinks he’s returned home.)
catherine sits in the back of the sunday school classroom
with too-big glasses on her face and half a smile
even as she learns about the end times.
she draws the dragons and beasts of the earth and sea in her workbook
and i wonder if she’s welcoming their arrival.
tales of doomsday have long nourished catherine.
the men with shiny faces on the tv that illuminates her dinner table
have been saying that the end is coming for years.
at least the dark horse of famine brings with it shimmering scales to mete out justice
instead of hamburger helper and canned peas.
catherine stares out the window at the
deep purple sky swirling like altar wine
sensing there is a storm on the horizon and praying, for once, that it will carry her away
to a world that has yet to come.
