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Annunciation to the Shepherds

By Sierra Faust

Illustration by Pynshaitbor Kyndait

I don’t pray but imagine myself in prayer, across the room

I look at myself where my ghost double is bargaining, making

what I’m sure is a good offer, a good trade. I want to assassinate

 a prodigious musician in broad daylight and take his place.

 If I can be casual, I’ll say that now the day is done with me

and I will take my leave from it. How quickly I feel myself alien

when left to my devices and an image occurs to me of taking

this skin of mine off like a wetsuit and hanging it fireside. 

I imagine how if I had a small child, I would put her to bed like a

shipwreck below me I saw through clear water. Where in all of this

howling — a deep contempt for time. All of the spirits and haunts in

this room are speaking to me, admonishing me to go. The sound of some

unnatural music piped in on little wires — What I need you to do

for me is to resist the impulse for me. The problem with earth is that there

are things here that evoke too much pleasure — so much that they

stop us in our tracks — that they create fanatics and zealots

and sick freaks and deviants. Any real god would never have left

this type of thing just laying around you can be sure of it.

I think of a gray place with you in it where we found the same

jagged little rock once and then we found it again without searching.

It was there and it was searching for us, you know, as stone tends

to do as anywhere you fall there is a stone to catch you in its cold mouth.

It’s still there you know and we could find it again if they gave us the time.

Every kind of winter animal made a pass through the snow and one

kind of creature fought the other and was struck and buried

and each god knew their work on earth was complete for a season

and each creature who won basked in the bright future it would

build for its beautiful children and even with no language or

numbers or symbols of any kind, each violent and wild animal

knows what each small pleasure costs. Hang me, I said – dead, 

in a black forest, discussing payment for the right eye and for the left eye,

a dark ocean alongside it, the whole thing in crisis.

 — a black ocean, a new ocean.


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Posted On: June 26, 2024
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