The Gospel According to Rust by Benjamin Goldberg via Grist

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The Gospel According to Rust

Brother, didn’t I build us a solace
in the jaws of junkyard Dobermans:

tarpaulin roofs over rusted Caddy
chassises, PVC pipe rafters elbow-

jointed and chained to a graveyard
of empty propane tanks? You called

the whole mess of survival too city
for us to live in. You called falling

in love with anything that couldn’t
give you tetanus being hex-screwed

or hobnailed. Off-grid, our country
bounded by chain link, you coaxed

any hour we needed from the hands
of broken clocks. I called you pyro-

mancer, rubble-rouser. Childhoods
burned into and sprang from less ash

than we used to fill our mason jars.
When we moved to an iron trellis,

you prepared by slaughtering a library.
You stuffed pizza box mattresses

with pages ripped from the world
you vowed to unwrite. You gagged

the leather-bound mouth of a bible
with nails my body had reddened.

You saved these for the palms
of any man who tried to save us.

 

“The Gospel According to Rust” originally appeared in Grist: the Journal for Writers and has been republished with permission of the author. It will be included in Best New Poets 2014. 

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