Morning in Galilee

                                                                              —yes;
some of us believed his speech could quell the sea just by reaching out palms-out, guiding tides, a la Moses the Mad. And as if His hands held up to the water, then, were like magnets repelling other, like magnets, He conquered the storm with magic, others of us said, if looked at more closely, might be, in fact, nothing more than mortal fears confused into a nightmare; not projection, but a crisis of sight in our dream against the state. Others that day may’ve still believed the sea’s distress was a chthonic gate opening downward, spinning with its antiphysics, downward where the Greeks believed every face was

                                  just a bruised translucence of a flower nibbled through—& each wrong committed equal to each face. Whatever it is, that place, it can’t be a lie. You see, what the miracle defied was we survived anyway, though what I had thought we’d risen above tiptoed behind us, whispering nowhere else; it was nothingness—it was the form nothingness takes from the vessel we’ve shaped for it: the quick storm forming as He slept leeside & dreamed he dreamt a cleft of crows broke his cheeks, later, like two shells of wax. I was there for that, too; his eyes rolling white, rolling up, like anyone of us. He made his pupils disappear. I saw       what I saw.

Read more from Issue 14.2.