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"ghosted" & "Here’s How Gods Die" by Vicky MacDonald Harris



ghosted


“You all live once,” the app screamed, like Munch. 

Filled bodies, slick and brickly

on the outside, hardened by days of burbled swiping  

that scorched fingers with every ocular rotation around the sun.           


“His inside flamed out soft,

his eternities now irrevocably cooled,” 

she said, unmatching, in bed,

freedom falling from her fingers doused in ghost pepper hot.



Here’s How Gods Die


Apocalypse tapped his fingers

on the broken floating table,

and wondered

why people looked at him as if

studying stained glass.


He gave them books, and viruses,

drugs, poetry and song, even stems that stung.

He treasured beyond measure

the cost of those, 

and the loss they masqueraded.


The requirements he absolved

them of, gluttons for his generational 

success. Mad people 

regaled their children, 

eating their stories and spilling them out.


As his chair drifted away from the table,

he wondered if the years had been lengthier,

and the sky brighter, 

if they all hadn’t died,

his life would have gone on any longer. 




Vicky MacDonald Harris’ work resides in The Lincoln Underground, The Flat Water Stirs: An Anthology of Emerging Nebraska Poets, Tiny Poems, Two Cities Review, and Hobble Creek Review.

Recent work in Fiery Scribe Review, Janus Literary, Strange Horizons, Ellipsis Zine, Great Lakes Review, Whale Road Review, Mantis, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and Paragraph Planet. Forthcoming in Persephone’s Fruit, and Eunoia Review.

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