Terrance Owens

POETRY

An Old Testament

We had been goofing off during the rosary,
and so, for penance, as Grandpa called it,
we were each to fill a trash bag
with the apples that had fallen
from the decrepit tree in his backyard.

But the ones that had dropped from the tree
were breached and gooey.
The whole yard was grimy with apple mash.

We kicked through the mushy remains
and then had a better idea
and started shaking the branches
to fill our bags with the fullest fruit.

But when the apples fell from the branches,
they uttered open, rotten and hollow already
and chock full of wasps that streamed
from the busted seams
like sin
while we screamed our parents’ names hollow.

Inside the house, Grandpa was finishing his rosary:
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit

Outside, the neighbor’s Doberman, Thunder,
barked its namesake through the chain link
terror of our faces as we scrambled.

As it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be.

I saw Joey kneel among the swarm,
arms in the air, calling it a life lived well-enough,
until he couldn’t take the pain any longer
and turned to run with us.

World without end. Amen.

Our black bags abandoned
like bodies in the croaking summer grass,
we fled down the street, swatting
and pulling at our clothes, the wasps
hemmed into our shirts and hair,
chanting their tiny gospel
all through our lives:

the trespasses,
the years,
the burning wheel of our fathers
coming round and round again.

Terrance Owens has had poems appear in Quarterly West, PANK, The Adirondack Review, and Lake Effect, among others. He has an MFA from Eastern Washington University. He lives in Seoul, South Korea.

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Image: Apple Tree, Vintage illustration by Arthur Rackham, Public Domain.