Angus McEwan, The Taleb’s Jinn (Artist Website, Social Media Links)
Watercolor
First there is a light
that hangs with two handles
from the ceiling, and a curtain that seals the room.
This god has an eye
for the ladies. And though we’re all
imperfect, lord, I’d like this lump lopped off.
Pestilence
might make me one
with the martyrs, but cancer’s a Biblical bitch.
The lamp’s a star
like an eye through the fog in Santa Cruz.
Some mornings, the light, not air, had heat—now
my face remembers
the wind scrubbing rocks
with sand, salt refracting in all its magnifying eyes.
Pure summer boils
out of the skin’s porous layers now,
driftwood coal that never stopped burning.
Skin like a candle lit,
skin stretched over its bone altar,
washed by water, bared to the knife, o lamb—
hold still. This god’s
the only one we’ve got.
He lowers his face to cover the sky.