To be published in Half and One Literary Magazine in Fall, 2026.

The Angel at the Garden Gate

Are we leaving then?
Do co-emergent particles also have hands to hold?
Unlikely, but let’s at least make an attempt
to share the flow, to rise in a common wind.
I’ll be your character witness.  I’ll testify the snake
made you and made you do it, then made up our leaving.
 
But you’re staying, aren’t you…
You’ll FaceTime by the tree, by the river,
by the fields of nightshade, never left out
in the bioluminescent light, the light’s light,
and long green rows of ease. Your hollowed healing.
Which is not mine.  Never was, although I abused it for flight.
 
I asked for rescue.  You showed pics of garden flowers.
I mined the singularity.  You showed pics of garden flowers.
I wore the skins of black holes. You showed pics of garden flowers.
I scoffed at the falconer’s call. You didn’t even bother.
So by the sacred law of the inventor of the firmaments
it made sense to me that you stay and I withdraw.
 
Is my road map then a restraining order? A handful of dust
thrown at the raddled Ganges, the conjuring roots
of the Amazon, the Nile with its baskets of prophets.
The fluvial credit card with its enshitified rituals
wanting to buy your love.  No, buying love for you,
I know how this works.  I ate the apple long before you.
 
There, something circles the pearl-white sky above
our garden home, our blue dot reminder of infinite emptiness.
O but so many snakes in Plato’s hip hop cavities of stone.
In that darkness, your darkness I open the cages of love.
Out extemporize the owl, the falcon, an inefficient raven.
Two hawk-like alpha predators and a silly tramp, hungry and alone.
 
The unheld multitude of wings musses our hair. Not selfie-ready at all.
(Each tendril pulled to its form; green, brown, then grey streaks).
O raptors of this rupture, you present such soft solutions, possible ends. 
Your collection of shining black wings and bloody beaks opens
each wound oozing roses in the fucking garden of self-consciousness.
It wasn’t denial, our sin of record. It was intentional perception.
 
Now the scriptures are also click-bait. Like the baffling “co-emergent”
reference used earlier.  This whole poem uses us.  From here
there is no science nor art that does not claim to see us.
The time away from time.  The pretense. What does not baffle?
The artifice of claims, the proud strut of knowing good and evil.
As though abetting a god we made in our heads makes
 
a speck of difference. Who forgives specks?
 
I hate this part the most. Saying good bye to you who stays.
It’s time to duck under the flaming sword of Manjushri.
(I must admit I’d thought it’d be you. But all creation myths
have twists.) It cuts down the weeds at these last doors of deception.
Mustard flowers fall to fire and their seeds dry in my long sleep.
The sword and flames find four directions and warn there is a fifth.
 
And what you hear is wind, not calls to return. Time to make a path
and pretend it is poetry. Caminantes on a pilgrimage to simple loneliness.
Cerberus’s barking does not say flee, it pleads “come to me.”
Everything depends on life chickening out in paradise lost.
What we so desperately listen for is desire, and so miss the birdsong.
Purifying birdsong, celestial and healing, isn’t a lie. The birds smell us.
 
O Majushri, in your wisdom, slice off the cancers in our world of ideas.
Harvest what is left of us, take the best of the Garden, the seeds
that survive false Giants, an egg or two, for the floods of remission.
I offered my body in that last paradise and was found wanting,
I dreamed the truth, or I saw the truth when I dreamed, I dreamed.
I slept away the obstructions and still the shadows let me sin.
 
We are of the same substance as the trees. I pocket the sacred plants
and am pulled out of your arms; you left behind with roots and rivers
and the fallen bodies, broken and leveraged to assist the living
end, in a time of names, an overanalysis, an accounting
of the myriad forms of both good and evil. I know, I know.
I cannot return to the tree. Why possibly would I want to? You.
 
The way ahead shines. It shines enough.
Birds, birds… the morning again. A fucking dove.  Are you kidding?
Another chance at reinvention, a profile and a screen,
a new shot at storytelling with sunlight plot twists, with bird offal
falling on the dust outside the gate; determine their portent
to praise this song of suspense for a god who is not an accountant.
 
We are pissed the garden shrinks us,
we are humbly pissed and we are truly sorry.
We made things die
on our watch.  The god that expels us was
what we made up after school. On the playground, online.
The sacred sounds of a sword ending us. Exile is our freedom.
 
The birds, the bloody birds,
will not stop forgiving us.