Your religion is cosmic, mine’s earth.
We might share a thin spirit, guess
best and try to love better,
but those sacred geometries
disturb me. You note the sharp corners
and stacked boulders to prove
it couldn’t be natural (horrifying).
Pyramids of the South Pole, queasy.
But you’re tender with fellow
Sasquatch watchers on the trail,
on cryptid river as solitude in
Appalachia millennia, so yours
is more personable, admitted.
Older than Saturn’s rings, than continents,
the landscape of your childhood is full of
ticks and bad municipal water,
maybe you moved to the desert
and aliens were truth evident.
East, they say if you hear your
name on a trail, no you didn’t.
West, it’s a revelation — your own name
in the sand, pouring from cow towers
and cat tracks. We’re born on
quicker sides of the spiral
and whipped through at the center.
Find bones in plough tracks and mushy in a spillway.
I don’t like speaking for it, just silent in the rocks, just
sit quiet, shut up sit quiet wait so we’re forgotten
and silent we don’t
have to say.

In the rapture we’ll know. The stories will
be sensational. We count different sins but I like to think
we’d gut at the sight of a new moon, a new sun.
My cryptid is sobbing. I’m granite. Here
east is dead soldiers, ravine, tree-dweller
to watch from its outcrop, fat on local legend.
Your religion is cosmic, a file of reported sightings
and prophecy answering demon head and
tail scales. You’ll spot it.
Wide and deep.
The crown.

And love like our thresh
we confuse each other.
Wander Saturday mornings,
radio beaming, breakfast cooling.
It’s like time only counts if
we get into it, hash it out over
the big American scam, voters
choke their best American
interests, and all back to the
great American cover-up.

Your religion is cosmic.
At end times the sky will split
and our little house on Friendship
will give out, brick scrapped,
our half-washed counters bloom,
diminish, and cycle clean.
Our small love will out
but today now the dishwasher hums,
don’t fret. You locked the door,
I called the DMV, we have cash
and a stocked fridge.
Grail
salve

Your religion is cosmic.
A serial drama, each dig a
new discovery, and
we’ve finally unearthed
the tomb.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Marissa Lingen during our annual Kickstarter.]