Brennan Burnside
Before lightning, my church says, God took no pictures
because there was nothing to see. Many, many years ago,
hills of moonlit dryer lint buried the after-life. God wandered
around aimlessly looking at a photograph like a conductor minding
his pocket watch. Thin glossy veneer of a folded Polaroid, the first and
last of its kind of his son at work, staring up at the sky
that’s not-yet and asking “Why?”
The day is overcast, and the road is uneven in this part. It’s hard
to see anything. A sooty fog advances from all corners
haunted by pareidolic outlines, like the Sea of Tranquility.
In fact, early sketches of heaven have an eerie similarity
to ruins on the surface of the moon.
They run into each other, mulling through the emptiness,
his son asks what he’s holding and God folds the photograph
in his hands. “Something special. You’ll see,” he says.
No one knows, not even his son, why he smiles, so they say
at church, their hands curled as if a palsy had overtaken their limbs
and we close our eyes and all curl our palms in echo.
Brennan Burnside lives near Myrtle Beach, SC. He blogs sometimes (burnsideonburnside.tumblr.com) and tweets (@bbburnside). His work recently appeared in Barnstorm and Fail Better.
A-Minor 