SHOOTER DRILL ABECEDARIAN
BY CHLOE SHANNON WONG
I.
A teen angel crashed into my windshield today—body
Bloodied, wings bursting like glass. I fished his eye from the grass, then
Crammed it into my pocket. I’m calling it a New Year’s gift. For you. In the
Darkness, it’s just a marble. A Magic-8 Ball, really. A miniature of Planet
Earth. In situations like these, a good trick for survival:
Forget who you are & where you were born. You can try begging
God for a rainbow, or Aphrodite, but don’t bother our history teacher.
He’s already left his mother & flown back to Bali. To cook moonshine
In the salinous white air. Another of life’s
Jokes: I’ve never climbed Mt. Everest. Never drank or skydived or
Kissed a semi-handsome boy. Let’s get some ice cream once all this is over, OK?
Let’s forget the angel. His halo on the curb. Do you think they make
Missing posters up in heaven? When I go, you’ll be my roommate for sure. Everything’s brand
New there—the Starbucks, the strip malls, the sky. All the curtains are
Organza & the saints work as milkmen & wow, every
Powerball ticket is a 200-billion-dollar win.
Question: what would you do with 200 billion more seconds? I’d eat a whole fistful of
Roses. I’d braid my cat’s hair into an exclamation point. Look,
Soon we’ll be indivisible,
The both of us cuddled
Under God’s fluffy pink robe. So many words don’t even exist in the Heavenly
Vocabulary: evil, unhappiness, grave.
II.
“What are we doing? What are we doing?” —Senator Chris Murphy, after Uvalde
