“The Sistine Chapel hived billions/of microbes, moss piglets/throbbing on God’s finger, frescoes flooded/with bacteria, angels fruiting cocci.”
Gods and Angels
Male jumping spiders rattle
feet like maracas to their mates.
Before the first flamenco dancer
twirled her tulip-ruby gown,
spiders sang over the dirt
decked with beetles sweet as dates.
Some heaven-threaded god
made arachnids in his image.
Adam named aphids
and each succulent beast by taste.
Still in Eden, they bundle
in dewy orgies, their climbing bonbons
pulsing rivers of silk,
catching moth angels whose wings clap
loaves of unleavened bread.
Saturn Devouring His Son
Saturn hungers. The black pucker
of his mouth slurps a bloody arm,
his clenched fingers splitting
a headless torso’s naked breadstick.
His eyes’ mad frisbees glare
as if discovered, sallow arms
and his hair’s grungy mop
stained by starless darkness.
Jailed inside his belly,
his children won’t usurp the throne
until lightning-brandished Jove
slices free the feast of deities,
delivering his siblings to dawn,
though in Goya’s painting
the king of the universe squats
in a void. Conquering heaven and Earth
jolts him with lonesome terror
like a blind fish swimming forever
through rivers of ice and coal.
Microbial Masters
The Sistine Chapel hived billions
of microbes, moss piglets
throbbing on God’s finger, frescoes flooded
with bacteria, angels fruiting cocci.
Mona Lisa’s eyelashes clapped face mites,
Machiavelli’s feather pen a fest
of bacillus. Nematodes slurped
the Arno’s sluggy brew when Florence’s dome
became a cistern of lice. Globs of spiders
haunted wood for Dürer’s prints
as fleas peppered rat backs with plague.
Tiny artists varnished history
with their slime as they kept painting
over the haloes of the saints.
Eric Fisher Stone is a poet and writing tutor from Fort Worth, Texas. His poetry publications include three full length collections: The Providence of Grass, from Chatter House Press, Animal Joy, from WordTech Editions, and Bear Lexicon, from Clare Songbirds Publishing House.
