Prophecy (Judgment Day) by Angela Wei
Where there is grass, sin. All flesh
and fat fish snapping in the pool.
Here I come to lull my head
and wallow waist-deep
in the sweet mirror of myself
swimming upward toward me.
I eyed the sparrows
cutting red berries in the air
to peel off the skull. Red fists.
Have they music? Timbre?
Cadence? Candor?
She sits. Sits with her hands
on her knees—viola, violence, violate.
Sways faithfully, her eyes shut to water,
the mirror-green miracle.
The woman is a forty-foot yacht
and the same amount of money.
Her violet cocktail glass
unshattered in the red hour.
When she is dying
she goes to work in a shiny black car.
I am working toward the dying
like a cat struggling out of the bag—
toward the rhapsody of my body,
the billowing of a laundry-line burial
on broadcast news, a cable
to unwilling memory.
I mistress the word, someone
called poet. Someone called
mama. Mind her manners.
Watch me & her
in the pool. Now—only me.
We glassy-eyed and weathered, we
an open-mouthed prophet,
we the inviolate grass
between graves, again
the sparrow, waking
to the past, sleeping
to the future. We worship,
O judge, O Tiresias, until we
dying, forget our cups, dream only
of underwater light.
Angela Wei is a senior editor for The Grotonian, a literature and art magazine, and the creative director of Circle Voice, a student newspaper. An alumna of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, Angela is a student writer at Groton School in Massachusetts. She has won various regional awards for her visual art, and her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Typishly, The Nasiona, Five South, and Cathexis Northwest Press. Angela enjoys baking, reading, and playing guitar, bass and piano. She lives in California.
Art by Adam Hacker