Back to Issue Fifty-Eight

for Simon Critchley

In poems, twenty-first century poems,
only Judas ever charges in. Starts as a black pen
mark gets bigger. Or he’s a doorway
at the end of this field. But he hustles,
breath comes out of him like forks. Birds,
other birds, some fifty yards away, while
the sun swears at itself for being too simple.
There’s other ways of talking to the dead.
I learned from books you learned
from books. I’m inside the doorway
now, the world’s mostly black, his mudroom’s haunting.
You know what I love? Stepping out. What
I love? A traitor. A kisser. The psalms. I
bring up Judas to talk about
my lunch, white bread and bologna,
sitting in my stomach like the coldest night right now.
Does Christ know? Probably. Do you know? Yes.
I know I’m holding my breath.
Right now, Simon, I’m holding––
What looks like March is always March.
What looks like me
is fucking me, looking for fishhooks in the dirt
and brushing off nothing I can sell. But I can
smell the silicone handle of a pistol on a hand. Believe
this: I can smell a gravel road, sometimes three
miles away. Simon, listen,
I also have a father. We’d go out and sight the rifles
and the haybales took all the bullets they could manage.
I swear I saw the trees behind them flinch and
the birds zip out of the woods like return
fire aimed so chaotically that I felt safe.
And I still feel safe. Judas’s body is
frozen on the furrows. I walk up, squat down.
Touch it.