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.

Rapture - Mark Brunke

Red Shoes - Mark Brunke

Love and Coffee

on the theme of rapture

I was invited

I remember,

Accepted

Into you again, and

Again, always first

Into your smile,

Then mud-spattered in

Tart tart pale sweet

Watery drags of tired

Love, tiered on down plants,

Down blankets and tear drops

On your June balcony,

Hanging on a telephone

Wire, a memory buzz of

Coffee alone in

A tired scarf while

You turn towards

An intersection,

A receding rail, training

A fading exhaustion.

My fingers, I think,

The left ring finger,

Hurt at the

Distal phalange.

Stiff and bent

For decades.

I was

Thinking of your car,

The pink engine

With its thin chrome

And motherly exhaust. I

Was thinking of your

Lilies, underfed

In their office corner

And I was thinking

Of your brown basket,

A threadbare wicker,

Burning in its hidden

Flourescent shadow.

I was thinking about

Baking in your kitchen,

With its flavored garage

And rising goldfish,

Watching the timer

Expire and listening

To that hideous fountain

Babble

As it packs for winter

Elsewhere.

Author Biography

Mark Brunke lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

Joseph, in his own words:

We will let Joseph’s work, video poetry on the themes of fire, America, somewhere never traveled, gladly beyond and rapture, speak now. We can’t hold it back any longer. Seldom do I comment on work published by our journal, as I like to allow the art and literature to speak for itself, but I comment now.

Thank you, Joseph. Please continue to do this work.

Anyone who might see this and be interested in learning more about Joseph, or in hearing from him, will please email me at dena @ haliterature dot com.

Dena Rash Guzman
Editor
Unshod Quills

“My Name is Joseph”

on the theme of “Somewhere Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWWKJqaGTnM]

Drunk On Empty Words

on the theme of Fire

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4a-7k-cBh8]

Visual Sculpture – The Sky Was Full of Snakes (part one)

on the theme of Rapture

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38zioorHgVg]

Visual Sculpture – The Sky Was Full of Clockwork Crows (part two)

on the theme of Rapture

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zyK_pcXJrI]

More of Joseph’s work can be found here:

Sacrificial Totem

Look for some great work utilizing the poetry of Richard Brautigan.