After 3 Days
by Jonathan Greenhause
“Fish & visitors stink after 3 days.”
- Benjamin Franklin
On the 4th day, the visitors spontaneously combust,
& on the 5th day, a fluorescent green aura
hovers above their ashes. After 2 weeks, pilgrims arrive
with dried marigolds & sea salt. Approaching a month, earth sunders,
swallows the neighborhood whole. Soon afterward,
God appears, isn’t recognized because
no one was expecting a porcupine. The villagers
slaughter God, reengineer the quills as writing instruments. Years go by,
people still attending churches, temples, & mosques, unaware
God is dead. Fishermen go on strike,
simultaneously protest the government’s strict limits on catch
& the ocean’s plummeting stock. This morning,
guests show up on our dusty doorstep bearing gifts, so we shower them
in asbestos, fling them & their flapping salmon
back into the river, watch unmoved
as they bob up & down, hoping to visit us upstream.
Jonathan Greenhause was the winner of the Telluride Institute’s 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in FreeFall, The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, The New Guard, New York Quarterly, Poetry East, and RHINO.