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Resurrection Day

By Jason Imanuel

PROMPT — Despite ...

When I saw Mt St Helens blow

I didn’t know what it meant,

those flowers of darkness

blossoming

above it, the small shudders in

ground beneath us.

About all I knew was that I

didn’t have to go to Sunday

school,

that both of my parents

thought the world was ending,

and that Jesus was finally gonna make good on all those

promises.

You’d think it would be

a celebration but Ma and Pops

were filled with so much anxiety

that the air in the house would have been cleaner had the ash

infiltrated and filled our lungs like

it was blanketing the trees outside.


I’m there still, from time to time,

madly trying to catch

how I’ll be left behind

and time and again I am.

I’ve blamed the people who

showed up and then

ducked out in plumes of ash and fire,

but it’s really just me who kept

leaving myself, blowing shit up

with my

fear dreams and confused questions,

and we all ended up covered in

anxiety, muttering prayers about

clarity and hope

and how to trust and who.

And maybe the prayers all piled

up over the years and tipped a

rigged scale,

because something’s different

this time, I keep finding ways to

stay,

if even just a bit more each day.

Maybe that’s all it was the whole

time,

that it takes years for some of us

to trust enough to learn

how to stay.

 

Jason Imanuel is a lover, a father, a writer, a handyman, and gratefully in recovery from all sorts of things living next to a lake in lower New York state.


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