Poetry by MJ Gomez

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THERE ARE CERTAIN WAYS TO EXPRESS TERROR


many of them wordless, 
involving the hands. 

Like a puppet 
thumbing the gaps in its palms,

I waited for intervention. Yes,
eventually, the trumpet was blown, 

the mountains reduced to carded wool
as promised. There was screaming, 

of course, which we readily mistook 
for joy. But no reckoning followed.

No palaces, aflame or otherwise,
were unveiled. Only the familiar silence.

The cold earth continued its waiting, 
embryonic, for some kind of absolution 

to be exhaled into its dry riverbeds. 

How terrible it was, to live past the end.
To be so paralyzed by a sudden freedom,

which is, to the survivor,
only a greater emptiness to stumble through--





DIRGE

I was once blameless too, you know? 
Like a dog, or perhaps something more assured,
less devoted. Like the idea of god
without that capital G.
Like a petulant child, teeth clenched
into fervent prayer:
I wish you would just …
I wish … I wish …
It’s comforting, to soften an image 
through omission. 
Softer, then. A god full of weaknesses.
Easier to picture hurt, and thus, cared for.
Another faith would say I’m more pious for it, too. 
It’s just simpler, loving what’s already dead
or dying. Grass grows greener in every heaven,
as long as its pastures remain unseen. 
The Book has promised, to the faithful, 
a most perfect eternity:
beauty and fragrance that only compound 
with time, rivers of honey made sweet 
as their drinkers wish—impossible joy 
trickling in every direction, 
inverse to this dunya—instead, scientists say 
our vision gets less vivid as we age,
something to do with yellowing lenses,
lessening cones. Everything was brighter,
back then. If you wanted, 
you could call the past heaven, for all it’s worth. 
Sing another ode to the suburbs,
the abandoned playrooms, 
all those canceled kids’ cartoons--
what difference would it make?
Before and after us lie mass technicolor graves, 
humming a lullaby I am slowly forgetting
—made all the sweeter for— 
night after passing night.





LAPSE

on days like these I understand better the want for a less forgiving God    
days windswept and sunless          beckoning a cold that pierces    

I call the adhan and my voice breaks when I reach the word success    
come to success    I echo piety to no-one in particular 

like a zookeeper’s raven waiting to be fed                  from these lens 
it is easy to view mercy as debt     a wooden eye       for an eye     

the gift of seeing outweighs even five centuries of worship 
narrates the angel                 I wanted to retort but I’d already used 

my best cursive     addressed many firm letters to heaven: I need 
something to hurt me back                  please and soon        

holy father I don’t need to be convinced of your plan but surely 
you knew I asked not for water but thirst 

now here I am [at your service] coiled and waiting

now       let me say the impossible thing:      I am so afraid
of living                  past this                 what to do what to do 

with these counterfeit hours        surely [you have no equal] 
surely you must know       when a pigeon is crushed beneath a tire

and I am haunted                by the image         which one of us was spared?

​


MJ Gomez is the author of Love Letters from a Burning Planet (Variant Literature, 2023). His poems are featured in Surging Tide, the Dawn Review, the Acropolis Journal, the Selkie, and others. You can find him on Twitter @bluejayverses !