Eucharist

by Kenneth Chacon

Eucharist

I once knew a man
who met God
in a crater on the moon.

He fed me the bones
of his fingers & told me
the crown of the earth rested
at my feet in the floor.

The armies of men
sharpen knives.
They fasten armor
to beasts, blades
curved to the exact
noose of a neighbor’s neck.

I saw the pieces
on the walls of the city,
calligraphies, darks reds,
sarcophagi, shit browns,
reports of famine, pestilence,
plague, & the like,
the snap judgment
of an officer of peace.

I told the man I was afraid
of soil. So pure.
I made lists of concrete
& oil-slicked lips,
a slight lisp & two fists,
a neat drink & a sloppy fuck,
plant meat rolling
between filthy sheets,
cigarette rich, cocaine poor.

Now,
the man haunts the trees
outside my window,
hunting for hours
he’ll never get back, announcing
the end of two for one
Happy Meals & the Second Coming,
so I scour the sky for a sanctuary
to keep the moon consuming
brutal crosswalks & time-lapsed
cameras & chickenheaded ghetto birds.

I don’t eat much, but my prescription
     is Always Filled.
I swap wasps. I bite maple & honey
locusts until I pass out
from the weight
of this diabetic crown.

Darkness divides the Light
    & lives in the perfect fold of tortilla,
      apple of My Third Eye.

I told this man,
Come, friend. Climb.
     Let’s eat each other lies.
Let’s drink heavy, black fruit & praise
    the certitude of the body’s
                    unmaking.
                          We won’t leave a drop.

Poet Kenneth Chacon is from Fresno, California where he spent his youth involved in the familiar story of gangs and drugs. By grace, he escaped the madness. His work has appeared in Colorado Review, Spillway, Blackbird, & Palette Poetry . The Cholo Who Said Nothing & Other Poems was published in 2017.

Artist K. Ryan Gregory is a Portland, Oregon based artist and photographer. He has been working on this series, The Color In Pain for the past ten years while while developing digital editing experience. This series has been shown in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, and New York, New York and can be seen The Otherwords Press and The Writer’s Repbulick.