Jonathan Duckworth

This One Pays the Cashier in Quarters

At the checkout line, I hold a five pound bag
of rice in one arm & a box of sugary cereal
 
that softens up my teeth for the coming rot
in the other. This line is a puzzle of physics:
 
something that appears in motion without
ever getting closer to its endpoint. This line
 
moves like a cadaver driving a Porsche, or
a flightless bird loosed on the barren moon.
 
The old woman at the front pays in rolls of
quarters, & for some reason the cashier is
 
required to weigh them first, & as so often
happens, I think of the apocalypse. When
 
it comes, whatever form it takes, someone
somewhere will be at a checkout line, paying
 
in quarters or even pennies, & the cashier
tasked to weigh & count & cash the coinage
 
will glance up from their drudgery & see the
fireball blooming outside. “Thank you, God,”
 
they’ll silently mouth.

---

Exegesis Americana

The God of the Americans drives
a 1985 Ford F250 pickup truck
& conceals His thinning gray hair
beneath a bright red ballcap.

The angry God of the Americans drinks
from a hipflask of dark matter. His liver
is a collapsing star. Inside His beer gut
those children who gave Him lip
 
are digesting, quiet now as stones.
The God of the Americans drives
his truck to a pine forest where
He gets stupid drunk & fires his gun
 
skyward, until He blasts a hole in
creation wide enough to crawl through.




--
Jonathan Louis Duckworth received his MFA from Florida International University. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appears in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK Magazine, Thrice Fiction, Jabberwock Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.