With Feathers by Sheldon Lee Compton

What place is safe now, so we can say what our good logic leads us to understand? Saying we will create our own sunlight, gather and store our own fresh water, conjure up a sense of peace and goodwill from inside the rubble. Allowing for extinction, we can stage our own resurrection and invent from thinnest air a prophecy that will stick to our ribs. Meantime, we will build for our enemies a great weeping from the pores of our skin to moat-circle the dark woods, always the dark woods, to watch the Gehenna vermin gnash out from that fetid place only to scatter at the turn of our cheek. Bring us hard-wired nirvana downloaded for the same safe comfort of a pastel world – the easy rhythm of a baseball game, a new joke in a familiar place, a hard rain beneath a carport roof, the first ever nationally televised 3-D film, the last few seconds in the gloam with the vermin before a light comes a’glowing from the open doorway, fine as baker’s sugar. What of these miracles, still swelled to bursting?

Sheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer and poet from Eastern Kentucky. His most recent work has appeared in Live Nude Poems, gobbet, Unbroken Journal, Wigleaf, Peach Mag, Gravel, New World Writing, and elsewhere. His fourth book, A True Story: A Novella, is due out in the summer of 2017.