Two Poems
Jacob DeVoogd How to Survive the Nuclear Age Separate yourself from the mold growing on your shower curtains. In mud or rust, shape your mental sins into swallowable capsules. Swim in the wake left behind by human herds after they fail to escape their bedsheets. Bathe in rocks, dive down and live in deserted bunkers hidden in hollowed-out mountains. Learn to count to X or, at least, pretend you know how to exhale. When the bombs drop do not even blink. If you do your eyes will stick together only reopening for the bitter taste of the unwashed nights you’ve spent fighting shadows. Call a sophist. She will tell you that you are a person or, perhaps, something that comes close. Cake your brain in gravel in an attempt to compose the grammar of being. Have your children draw mushroom clouds instead of superheroes or their fathers. Invest your hope in fishing poles used in games of skill played between boys and fish; what they catch must be full of mercury, their mothers will pay for loving them by being poisoned. Do not forget to assign the post office with registering the dead. Extra Innings The unsorted ghosts of your father are buried in your bone marrow, sobbing like gutters overflowing in a sudden downpour. You treat tears as he did and find yourself less than symmetrical as the bottle empties and pills disappear. You cannot stomach the world’s fullness, the glimmering footprint of daylight sinks into your innards and festers there, morphing into what you hate about your own reflection. You start littering every chance you get, tossing out wrappers and cardboard from your bedroom window. You purposefully overfill your gas tank, letting the runoff bend into a sepia river that you hope will one day, if you ask God sweetly, turn into a pool deep enough to drown the galaxy. At night, you look at stars and become convinced that fire is only a trick meant to lure humanity into counting the things they think have value. You set ablaze the baseball diamond you drank your first beer at and watch as flames overwhelm the potential happiness of other children. |
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About the Author: Jacob DeVoogd is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University where he serves as a graduate instructor. He placed second in the 2017 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, has twice received honorable mentions from Glimmer Train Press, and he received the 2017 Gwen Frostic Fiction Award. Born in Detroit, raised in Chicago, Jacob currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.