Frozen rain pours.
It burns eyes and scars
skin and the barks of trees.
Soot settles on roofs,
flowers people’s faces
black like moldy bread.
Newts, bats, and fenny snakes,
peril on local extinction.
Witches cannot cast fire.
Hungry children cry so loud
the rivers ripple with wakes
and headstones topple.
Some survive by eating horse
dung, putrid shoes, mildewed corn.
Cats and dogs wisely hide.
Hungered parents undig graves
of recently deceased folk and kin.
They crack the skulls and suck the brains.
They break a holy contract and eat their kids.
Childrens’ cries part the sky. The sun shines
for a day and does not rise the next.
On the horizon, a new music
from bleating goats and mooing cows
in the fields collapsed and dying.
Pagans’ legs and arms decay.
The most blessed die or hear god
from behind the clouds laughing
for forty-five years. At the end, the plague,
rats’ fleas enact the lord’s next miracle,
unshaken faithfuls devoured in prayer.
For over twenty years, Tom Holmes has been the editor and curator of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. Holmes is also the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including The Book of Incurable Dreams (forthcoming from Xavier Review Press)and The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, as well as four chapbooks. He teaches at Nashville State Community College (Clarksville). His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: thelinebreak.wordpress.com/. Follow him on Twitter: @TheLineBreak