Catechism

Jenny Darsey said it was fact:
they nailed his feet and hands
to the tree.

Then some guy stabbed him
with a spear and blood gushed.

There was blood everywhere,
Jenny said. Like she was there.

Then she ran to kick the ball.
I held my breath.

When Jenny came back, her face
had changed.

Then lowandbehoed, she said,
just like that, lowandbehoed,
He rose from the dead!

I gasped, then chomped down hard
on my sagging stick of red licorice.

The Snake

It had found a brother,
a branch to stretch against.

Both were gray with black argyle but the branch’s
random scabs of bark fell short of pattern.

And the branch didn’t swell in slow motion
like its thicker twin,

as a twitching rodent bulge passed barge-like, expanding,
then deflating the diamond skin

in glacial time, the snake’s black head pointing,
like a finger in warning,

eyes dull with process
that would go on at a pace painful only to us.

We turned and looked away as in that dream
where you’re naked before a sea of eyes.

You cover yourself with both hands,
not godlike or dressed in fig leaf but

graceless, desperate to conceal.
And you run away squirming as people do

when they must escape, clutching their shame,
the only part of the dream that is ever real.