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Jillian Saucier
The Dream

On a nameless beach in France,
revolution: "But, Jesus," I say,
"you can't have walked on water
because you're a metaphor."

He looks at me as though I am Iscariot,
but the prince stands next to me
with a face of clay, hair adrift
on the sooty breeze.

Jesus Christ turns away
and I see his feet
feathery and clawed,
golden like lion skin

but mangled, a mass of bone like my own.
Disciples around us flock like chattering gulls:
I am marvelous,I should write a book,
they say. They ignore

the man who has just left me
with ashes in my mouth,
who marches silently to the cold surf,
glides away on the gray waves.

_ _

Jillian Saucier received the Ora Mary Phelam Poetry Prize from Georgetown University in 2003 and 2004, and has studied and taught in Austria. She has read her poetry at Phillips Exeter Academy, Massachusetts College of Art, MIT and elsewhere.

<< Back to Issue 15, 2012

 
 
Published by Pen and Anvil Press
 

 

ISSN 2150-6795
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