sunken ships & glowing gods

poems on the holy and the hidden

Sunken Ships & Glowing Gods

imagine our world
without the masts of shipwrecked cities.

they rise into the swirling soup of our sky 
and laughing at us like wine-drunk gods 
as we drown in their illusions,
caught in their wiry webs
of insidiously inviting glow.

imagine everything 
that reaches its hands to the sky 
as if to touch something. 

the trees rise up to face the sun, 
towards their god. 
the people lift up to see beyond the sun,
towards our god.

but what is the god of the concrete claws on the horizon? 
do they need anything but to tower over us?

imagine Jesus
crucified on a telephone pole.

---

excavatum

Dear God:

before I was born, did you plant
gold in my mother’s womb?
put treasure in my chest?

did it shine so brightly
that you hid it in me
so no one would see?

or, to you, is burying your love
too deep to ever show
a worse sin than hate?

has my body become
a self-conscious love letter
folded, hidden words of honey,

sweet sticky secrets that slowly spill
over strawberry-milk skies as i
wake from another dream i’ll forget?

bottle it up quickly, you tell me
to plant it into the dirt
and hope it grows a golden heart

but i beg you remember that
gold will never bloom:
it can only be unearthed. so

go ahead, excavate me.
find my treasure and kill me, too.
lift me from this earth and closer to you.

originally published in eleven40seven Fall 2025 edition