Abecedarian Where They Name the Boy

Absence first: raise him
blind under a quilt of cosmos—
canopy his body with fireflies,
demanding a pair of half-paled
eyes and a fantasy
from an unfaithful
god. They’re wary enough of curses and hanging lightning. Still, it’s not
heresy or hell that frightens them.
In a year, the boy will cling to his father’s arm like a
jail bar, waiting to be
killed or
leveraged against the sky. The titles have already been written:
man breathing man; man who transforms; man
named Sacrifice; man vs. post-man. This is the part where they
open the boy like a casket and the emptiness becomes
proof of a ghost. The storm is still
quiet enough for the unwed
rain to be tasted—the
salt of filthy magnolias and
thunder.
Under a different night the boy would’ve been
vindicated long ago, but today he
wears the fingerprints of men and scrawled
X’s on his collarbones. Today they paint him in
yellowed light and feed him to the sun. He becomes
Zenith but the name is brief—swallowed in a vein of the split, soundless sky.