- Mar 21
- 2 min read
Two Poems
LET ME SHOW YOU HOW TO PLEAD
Lately, I live one scripture to the next.
God said, and I humble myself.
Heaven the infinite acre of wildflower.
Blessings the seed.
One text the four-chambered heart.
The next text the four-stomached beast.
Oh, our God is hungry.
I bend a knee to better fit in his throat.
ARS POETICA WITH HOMEMADE JETPACK
I’ve had other bad ideas. The hand-crafted
freeze ray, to which I lost a finger, was a dud.
The artisanal laser cannon ended in sunburn.
My cat, having wandered into the DIY teleporter,
vanished forever, leaving me a collar, some catnip,
an empty litterbox. But shouldn’t we suffer
a bit in the draft phase? Shouldn’t we leave
behind a workshop strewn with flameless throwers
and inert ion knives, all the flawed prototypes,
as evidence that that any successful plot
is a product of will more than genius?
I wasn’t the smartest villain in the Academy
of Evil. Doctor Necrosis was a classmate—
well, he was Mister Necrosis back then.
Imagine organic chem, struggling with compounds
and complex reactions, while sitting beside
a kid with a swollen braincase, red eyes,
and those hands, all that decaying flesh!
How easily he could scribble out equations,
while I could barely think, the stink of his dying
thick in my nose. By the end of the semester,
he’d murdered the teacher, assuming control
of the class. I got a D. Now he’s divorced
in Reseda, selling insurance. His last evil plot
failed years ago. I hear he watches reality shows
and makes androids of the contestants.
Meanwhile, the homemade jetpack that I’ve built
for my next robbery still needs some refinement:
the thruster immediately takes me to altitudes
where oxygen’s scarce, the backs of my legs
are quite charred. But God, look at that view—
from above, the horns and sirens fade
to silence, the armored trucks glide peaceful
and dreamlike from bank to bank like ants in a line,
and the far-off fields are radiant circles, wide
portals waiting for imagination to step through.
ROSS WHITE is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.