Owen McLeod

Corona Sutra

The End blew in horses with bat-like wings,
swarms of animated gifs, drifts of human limbs
charred as if roasted on a spit. We dug trenches
in the fields, traded all our ideas for things, stashed elders
in the bellies of B-17s. Nothing that survived
was exactly what it seemed. Trees were not trees, bees
not bees, and the Vs overhead were drones, not geese.

Thus we began to hammer out our slogan.
Finally we settled on Beef You Can Believe In. The irony
was lost on everyone but the gargoyles, who lived, as we did,
with scare quotes around their names. For eons we floundered
in a sort of –ish zone, no longer what we’d been, not yet
what we’d become. We needed something suited
to our talents, but not easily transferable to video.

Winter was the toughest time, what with refugees
huddled around their fires, confusing that feeble light
with the illumination we had to offer. On the bleakest days
we felt like nincompoops, trudging through the snow
past boarded-up shops, our sleds piled high with gilded tomes.

You didn’t mean to be such a tough crowd.
It’s hard to get a creature to shed its protective layer.
The trick was convincing you that an exoskeleton
does more harm than good. (Imagine how that went.)

Sometimes we’d break through. Your shell would crack
like lake ice, offering a glimpse of swirling darkness
underneath—but deeper, beyond that darkness,
we could always see a light. It was just too cold.
A week later and you’d be frozen over again.

Could it be that you are more like fields
than frozen lakes, sown and reaped according to seasons
of your own, best by your own hands? We piled our gifts
on makeshift tables, let you wander by as you wished.
Our powers atrophied. It felt OK to let them go.

Gradually, something like the world returned.
We learned to be content just to be here among you—
hearing you laugh or sing softly to yourself, watching you
hang clean sheets in the sun, or drifting off with the paper
in your lap, forgetful of what has been and what again will be,
drunk on the flutter of the ginkgo’s golden wings.

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Owen McLeod's poems have found homes in Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, New England Review, Ploughshares, Sixth Finch, The Southern Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Dream Kitchen (UNT Press, 2019), won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.