Today's poem is by Ashley Wang

God and I Play Russian Roulette / The Youth Group Debates Capital Punishment
       

The first scene of rapture opens like this: the glass
on my desk choking out a bullet, metal conception.
& suddenly you're barrelling over my lampshade-
shadow-trapdoors, muzzle pulsing against
my temple. So I hollow. I swallow commas. I follow
you into a blank-spaced cellar, shatter the walls
with voids. & when the silence grows too wide, jams
against the spinning cylinder, I hand you a return
receipt with all the letters that slipped out the hatchway
of my belief. But let's reverse the roles, God. God,
your chamber's empty. God, don't bluff. Don't you see
the pistol in my palms, the way it blinks in this bonewhite
basement. So confess to me. Tell me, God. Tell
me the girl wasn't a blood lunar eclipse, fire-alarm hands
flitting over my jaw. How she wasn't an omen or another
ghost hanging from the ceiling. Tell me retribution isn't just
the way the moonlight bares its teeth over our license
plates each night. That the neon billboards hailing repent
or choose life won't haunt us down in a Kowloon pawn
shop tomorrow. Tell me this world will last. That we'll
be gorgeous for longer than five years, and we'll outlive
the trigger, and one day all there is to do is laugh
in the face of a picket sign. Tell me that language
isn't just a ship with interchangeable parts. It's okay,
keep talking. We both need this gunpoint to survive.
I already know the ivory church pews are just boneless
reproductions—discount doors to an empty Garden
of Eden. I've known for years that the girl's clasped
palms contain the entire sky. & wind is just another
verb for desire: her body split between the two parting
hands of a pocket watch, humming along the razor edge
of a 24-hour asymptote. See, I've been trying, God.
I've been trying to understand. When I first loved
the girl, I thought it final: we'd end as two pistols
baptized in a basement, caking gunpowder on
a country-fair mirror maze. Violent from all angles.
I, both the perpetrator and victim of my most
stunning crime, circumscribed by the reflections
of our slippery vocabularies. God, be honest—
here's my gun to the night and no more metaphors
to spill—tell me if a body like mine can live without
possession. Without ruin, without touch, without
light. Tell me a body like mine can pull the trigger
and still die holy.

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Copyright © 2023 Ashley Wang All rights reserved
from Black Warrior Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission