Theodicy
Please God help me find
some path into sleep.
Why should I count sheep
when you’re divine?
My mind trips along and
a caravan of fears follows.
A modest dip into your magic purse
would make them disperse.
Did I ever tell you you look divine?
The cortege glitters
in the fanged sunlight and I’m afraid.
Shall I warn the weeping ladies
of the deus ex swooping down on us?
Shall I warn the weeping ladies
of the deus ex swooping down on us?
Did I ever tell you you look divine?
The Soul Illimitable
I can’t find a metaphor to save my wife.
Like a doctor, the trope has its limits.
Augustine says the soul does, too:
“The house of my soul is narrow.”
This morning she found it hard to swallow,
and I had just sat down with my coffee!
“The house of my soul is narrow,”
a burnt-out man in pajamas with a butter knife.
She calmed down in half an hour, or half my life.
By then the coffee was cold. “The house
of my soul is narrow.” I’m so beat,
and my anger’s shallow and self-directed.
I help with her panties. Her legs are stubbly
and sallow, her hard feet searching for entry
into this simplest of tasks, her nails horny
despite a pedicure, brief respite from strife.
And then the pad. She used to call them with a laugh,
“my unmentionables.” Now, she utters nothing
but remnants that echo around her hollowed mind.
All dressed up, her girlish smile rakes like a harrow.
Stars, some dead, quiver
on the pane.
Bourbon and Scotch,
never go bad.
Time qua time,
says the physicist,
is an illusion; yet the ice deliquesces,
stars blench in the appalling sky.
Alec Solomita is a writer and artist working in the Boston area, USA. His fiction has appeared in the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, Southword Journal, and Peacock, among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal. His poetry has appeared in Poetica, Litbreak, Driftwood Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Galway Review, Panoplyzine, The Lake, and elsewhere, including several anthologies. His photographs and drawings can be found in Convivium, Fatal Flaw, Young Ravens Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, and other publications. He took the cover photo and designed the cover of his poetry chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” which was published in 2017.
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