After The Rapture Had Passed

we drank like beaches
trying to swallow the ocean,
our voices, trapped in bottles
rising with the tide
(there was a message
behind the shouting.)
We made a bonfire in the front yard,
with papers and notebooks for kindling,

left a history of the people we had tried to be
smoldering in a birdbath,
a stone urn collecting the
chronology of unfortunate mentors
and indelicate lessons that had
made us so calloused.
We called it cremation,
and meant rebirth.

When the embers of old promises
suffocated the flames,
we breathed for them, sending
clouds of cinders swirling through the air—
with each exhale, we watched the ashes hover,
before they succumbed to slow descent,
a picturesque blizzard
surrounding some kind of Eden.

When the rain started, it was nothing like a baptism.
It was something holier. We stood like
the lungs of bonfires, reading aloud
whatever the flames left legible
(the words, coarse shadows
on newly golden pages).

We joked about apocalypse,
left the taste of rapture wrapped
around our tongues, as we drank
like saviors and laughed like thunder.

This is what I know of scripture—
sacred is just a word for that which rebirths us
into our bodies. It is not found in bibles,
just the remnants of bonfires
forming a galaxy around us.
When the fire swallowed everything
we’d once called holy,
we started breathing for ourselves again.

I was surprised at how much
it felt like prayer.

Author Biography

Chris Leja is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He has represented LC three times nationally at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational, is a founding member of the Sparrow Ghost Collective in Portland, and just released his first chapbook, A Chronology of Quiet Thefts. He also has an impressive collection of snakeskin shoes and a peculiar affinity for the word “vernacular”. You can contact him at cleja@lclark.edu.