runum’s Reviews > Judas Goat: Poems > Status Update

The way I understood it, if the ending was good,
it cast goodness back over the whole.

In a language neither of us knows,
she is telling me she loves me,
and I am repeating the sounds back to her,
learning.
It sounds like the heart trying to leave the chest.

How else to say it.
I am my father’s only child, and he is my mother. // I know his regrets.
I could list them. But instead at his funeral
I will talk if I can talk about nights like this,
how good it felt just to be next to him,
to be the closest thing he had.

When a friend says, over the phone, “You got the life I expected to get,
and I got yours,” I think we’re appreciating irony, so I laugh
I often laugh when I’m in charge
of sharing bad news

I knew God listened. And I knew where to aim.
All the time, every second. I lacked
but with aim.

Or this is silence
betraying itself as currency.
If Judas coughs up a coin into my hand,
let it be night, the birds, hungry.
If I put what was once liquid metal in my mouth,
let my mouth become the metal burning:
a glossy orange arm reaching up, back to the crucible.

"I could imagine a version of our lives
in which he kept all his suffering secret from me.
I saw the beer on the counter. I saw myself drink it."

oh okay we're just starting with devastation i get it