What Rough Beast | 07 01 20 | J.D. Isip

J.D. Isip
Archangel

for Pete

The best of us had gorgeous golden hair, impish dimples,
soft, enormous wings, and kind eyes, left his Daddy’s
church in middle Tennessee to be the youngest pastor
with a podcast, hipster band, sun-touched skin peaking
out from his chest tight pearl snap, three snaps undone,

Let the mutants sit right next to the righteous, preached
for all of us to let up a little, even when they lost the baby
he kept smiling, tears dripping from his boyish cheeks
to a tiny soul patch, the beginning of what would be
a full goatee, a beard, a total transformation

Came with no warning, the techno-organic infection already
cording his pink skin into a hue more blue and metallic,
reading about his own life falling apart, the divorce, losing
the boys except on weekends, turned his eyes red at the corners
and then red altogether, seeing the world for the first time

Like most of us always saw it, on fire with shame and hatred,
emails and handwritten letters heavy with stones and curses,
all his supple feathers strewn behind him, limbs once lithe
and nimble drag him through a town he created, a steeple
at its center, a long line of trucks and mini-vans rolling into

Sunday morning worship months later, most of us stopped
going, felt the threat of damnation and Apocalypse acutely,
as if letting our guard down welcomed this destruction,
as if we maybe always believed the wild-eyed First Purifier
who correlated our genes and lives to hurricanes and tornadoes

But I only saw one mutant do that and he called himself
Archangel, spread his new wings armed with sharp feathers,
thwip, thwip, the tongues of each accuser nailed by tiny knives,
stayed by their own awe, every new generation of judges
stands before the camera crews, swears, “We never saw it coming.”

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow JournalElsewhereDual Coast MagazinePoetry QuarterlyRogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

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