Today's poem is by Sébastien Luc Butler

There Are Things They're Not Telling You
       

In the beginning there are red apples
& green apples & sometimes yellow apples.
If you crush them you get cider. Back then
everyone drank cider even little kids even
for breakfast. A fungus got on the apples
for the cider & into the cider & then
everyone started seeing witches. Duck duck goose.
Holy holy witch. They put rocks on the witches
until they were crushed like apples. Sin exists
because of apples but it isn't the apples' fault
you see sin exists because the story had to begin.
Because the girl. Because the rot. Because
all the endless seeding. You've never seen a witch
but you've seen bottle flies around a pregnant cow's
eye. You've seen the road rechristened
each spring in its frog spawn of moist pupils
which look like olives but they tell you no
you can't eat them & you are certain
there are things they're not telling you.
Johnny Appleseed comes & walks over the earth
& spreads his seed behind him like a trail of eyes
or the pebbly defeca of deer walking
in the forest. On the trail one day: a luna moth,
its body eaten out, the wings & tail left,
as if consumed only with half a heart.
You should eat one a day but not the seeds
the seeds will kill you. As if you can separate
the part that kills from the part you need to live.
No not the cigarettes you made a promise
to your mother. Beer? Copiously but rarely. Acid?
Yes because. This amber stamp you take
in the attic of what used to be a farmhouse.
It comes from mold fungus on bread. You take it
& see what mold sees, live how mold lives, nothing
not expanding & dying off in endless holograms
of itself, the trees branches bare in mid-winter
brimming forth leaves like a million child
hands in seconds & dying back in the time
it takes you to breathe & you think this is the God
they spoke of in the dryer sheet-scented pew
on all those Sundays anathema-ed with sleep,
the days blurring mushed to a pulp in your mouth.
The gnostics believe there is a God but that
he is not good. That he created our world
out of a selfish need to be worshiped, to be loved.
You study this in college but only get so far.
You take the apple in your hand, its skin spotted
like the hide of an appaloosa. Here, there is no prince.
Nothing to put you to sleep. Nothing to save you.

Tweet
Copyright © 2024 Sébastien Luc Butler All rights reserved
from Black Warrior Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission