cure for missing souls

by Jason Nelson

At the park two children start biting each other to death. All the other voices

joined in. It was a wailing chorus of distressed people. There was a crowd of

dead men fleeing in the wind and they took with them the souls of the children.

The Puerto Rican man who dives too fast zipped by and his wife sat eating

pretzels by his side. The man’s hands and his feet were decaying. The sound of

people crying was coming over the radio. God said, All you poor people, I can

see that you1ve been crying. And the

people whispered back, we were more like ourselves than we had previously

imagined. God said, you spend so much energy on forgetting and even as he was

speaking, his hands and his feet were decaying, or, and even as he was spreading

his hands across his people, his people were decaying. And the people said,

spirit come back here– I need you here with me.

Love

I remember this Yugoslavian cowboy painter who had slicked back hair and very

formal Roman busts in all of his paintings. He flicked his finger like there

was a cigarette and said No good. He meant take off your shirt as I paint you.

You were left to think he was offended by the tones of your shirt and how they

blended with the tones of your skin. Matisse sat on his balcony turning things

over in his mind: mat, fish, bowl. Some people experience it as prayer. They

have never existed before.

Pray harder.

we don’t think we’ve been so bad.