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Prophecy (Judgment Day) by Angela Wei



Art by Adam Hacker
Art by Adam Hacker

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


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