Nativity as Pietà
“That’s how Fakenews is born.”
—Dmitry Polyansky, First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN
no windows so the snow is
glass before it lands
steam from the sloughed-off
face of the hospital bombed
the pregnant mother stretchered
out atop a strawberry blanket
hauled from inside in between
the blast heaps in between her
breathing who says to the medics
when she learned her baby
wouldn’t live kill me now has died
as in between breaths the UN rep
from Russia says this hospital
has been turned into a military object
bombed in between his cease
and fire in between an acre of land
50,000 pounds of strawberries
can grow which aren’t they called
by how carefully they’re held
above the dirt by straw by hand
Reading the Bible Upside Down and Backwards
Reporter: “Is that your Bible?”
President: “It’s a Bible.”
It begins quickly come I surely saith things
and ends with God beginning the in.
And once the in begins, Moses opens
up the sea to let the army of the drowned
out. In the upside down and backwards
Bible, that first false idol calf puddles
back to plain old gold again, a little pat
of butter. The upside down stone rolls
back into place and reseals in Lazarus.
Jesus wipes spit and mud from the eyes
and blinds a guy. The crowd lolls until
louder and louder the multitude growls
around a single fish. In the upside down,
in the backwards, in this inverted perversion,
there is no vaccine for obscene, for kneeling
with protestors only to load gas canisters
that skitter and bounce up the ceiling
of the street, leap back into the arms
of the National Guard. In the upside
down, George Floyd floats above his
murder, a flag in no wind, only now
his stock-still killer’s pole-driven in
the poured cement of Minnesota sky.
And we haven’t even met halfway yet.
The beginning and the end only ever
touch in the middle of the street. And
I just learned the verse at the exact center
of the Bible is in Psalm 103, my soul:
and all that is within me. I just learned
less lethal’s the name that’s vetted by legal.
A dozen burning cities might be multi-system
inflammatory syndrome, but each case takes
a tremendous amount of resources,
so maybe when the smoke clears your
dumb lung might learn something.
Not Coming Back
Late summer stem scruff finally drops
from the gutter onto page ten of your book.
It’s a ballpoint Kandinsky coltish squiggle,
more a trot than not, but springy, a-dance
askance on the poem that ends with a riderless
horse, trespassed field at night, and your death
as you imagined it. What I first thought
unknown funky wing design, became one
butterfly carrying the corpse of another past,
then came to rest as a mating pair, startled,
but not yet done. So one flies away and
the other goes dead weight ballast sandbag
so as not to fight each other going nowhere.
Late Sunday light might even make you again
taste the peaches not coming back, but it’s why
peaches end in aches—stomach, heart, summer
stars, somebody—don’t let the bough go
and smack you on the spring back.
—for Dean Young
1955-2022
Song to Survive the Spring
Moth a dead moon down left
corner of the dormer.
A necklace of sprinkler strewn.
Another noon takes off all its shadows
and just stands there.
Look, it’s Lorca’s
corneas.
It’s part of the world that hasn’t broken off yet.
It’s connotation and detonation. Rain,
the least adhesive.
What are we
sentences?
I me you your my mine.
Glass stained sky
and the black gouges punched out of it,
crows.
Orpheus Upshore
It's not I can't sing it,
it's it ain't a song, not
for long. It’s not
another world, it’s daylight,
an ad hoc vatic havoc
we are going to
call okay weekday.
Squirrels chase tree
to tree like the neural
pathways of a pretty
good idea, and later
claw clatter around
a walnut trunk’s
cracked bark sounds out
water down cement
steps. For a second
what floods in isn’t
the basement or rain
but that time for hands-
free seeing I held in
my mouth the flashlight
that one sudden moth
went wild over the end
of. It was like French
kissing death right there
in my lit skull skin mask
and the strobe pulsed
shadow of it on
the floor kissed back.
James D'Agostino is the author of Nude With Anything (New Issues Press), The Goldfinch Caution Tapes, winner of the 2022 Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser Press), and three chapbooks which won prizes from Diagram/New Michigan, CutBank Books, and Wells College Press. His chapbook, Gorilla by Jellyfish Light, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Forklift Ohio, Conduit, Mississippi Review, Bear Review, TriQuarterly, Laurel Review, and elsewhere.