Poem of the Week: Believing is a Sad and Twisted Art, Jim Pascual Agustin

Mother coming home with a basket

stinking with severed heads and crying in her sleep.

Father cracking the galvanized iron sheet

shaped into his skull like a second

layer of scalp. Brothers and sisters

peeling their cold masks like plastic

wrappers from grocery meat.

Churning half-children from the soft-

hard bone, I join them in offering

all our separate pain to the god of sadness,

the god of the lost, dying families

whose solitude is a refrigerator.

We all grow tired of making

our sad art as we cringe and crawl

farther from each other,

blaming the lonely god we’ve created,

crushing it beneath our soles.