David Moolten
End of Days
Your brother in his higher power,
metal chair and Sanka phase
of recovery, corrects you, tells you Jesus
meant all the days after Calvary
not just the final week or so.
It’s happening now, has been since they tugged
you out of a stoic blue collar woman
who sighed for years at his disaster,
and before that your father’s. Forget the dying
Amazon, the apocalypse selective,
almost subtle in the ghost mill towns
of Pennsylvania. Yet truly saved,
your brother rises above it all each time
he wakes without the shakes, flees history
just by working at Denny’s,
exodus easy, the exits close,
life as he knows it ten square blocks.
He wants you to attend God’s wedding,
grabs the brim of his Phillies cap
in the wind like he’s about to fly
into the miracle of blue sky
despite stray cats, litter blown against a fence,
the world ending while a child
licks an ice cream, a crowd boards a bus.
Your brother in his higher power,
metal chair and Sanka phase
of recovery, corrects you, tells you Jesus
meant all the days after Calvary
not just the final week or so.
It’s happening now, has been since they tugged
you out of a stoic blue collar woman
who sighed for years at his disaster,
and before that your father’s. Forget the dying
Amazon, the apocalypse selective,
almost subtle in the ghost mill towns
of Pennsylvania. Yet truly saved,
your brother rises above it all each time
he wakes without the shakes, flees history
just by working at Denny’s,
exodus easy, the exits close,
life as he knows it ten square blocks.
He wants you to attend God’s wedding,
grabs the brim of his Phillies cap
in the wind like he’s about to fly
into the miracle of blue sky
despite stray cats, litter blown against a fence,
the world ending while a child
licks an ice cream, a crowd boards a bus.
--
David Moolten’s last book, Primitive Mood, won the T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). His chapbook The Moirologist won the 2023 Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming. He lives in Philadelphia.
David Moolten’s last book, Primitive Mood, won the T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). His chapbook The Moirologist won the 2023 Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming. He lives in Philadelphia.