New Testament Liquor Store

I.

Nightmares in his eyes, handgrenades in his pockets,
he stepped out of the Missouri wheat fields,
it was just the beginning and when they tell it:
Man, was he tight! Swinging a rusted chain,
a pissed off Messiah, a drunken saint, praying
on tongues. He cast out devils half-lit at the tent
revival and the old ladies danced in the spirit,
fell down in the sawdust, slain, slain, a grand
maul of a seizure as the deacons catch them
like sleeping virgins their eyes roll up in their
pious orgasms. Jesus wept. Jesus crucified.
The lay minister calling for repentance from
the congregation from behind his pulpit,
a cash register at the liquor store that sits
on his chest of an evening as he pushes a paper
bag to his face drinking from a foreign cup.

II.

Talking out the side of his neck, the otherside of his face,
he brings the multitudes to the Lord in Sunday Temple,
white gravel dust swirls in the parking lot to the ticking
cars sitting outside the church waiting for rapture too,
trash blows across the lot, a terrier waddles down the
street as the old songs are sung, the laying on of hands
begins, but on the square a veteran sits on a bench in
front of the newly erected World War II memorial,
wishing the bar across the street was open for a beer,
waiting for his wife to pick herself up off the floor
of the Tongues of Fire Holiness Church and come home
and then he begins to remember the big bands, Hank
Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and just how good the old
music is and how silly the music of the last twenty years,
no meaning to the words, just ditties, like when he awoke
contemplating God-damned technology at 3 am--he heard music.

III.

Holy music from a Fender guitar played by a long-haired
Jesus Freak. Temple filled with farmers, mechanics, welders,
day laborers and their wives; children coughing, bored,
not yet believing in the possibility of their own mortality,
the preacher jumps up and down on the floorboards hollers:
If you were to die today, would you know? If you were to die?
A dust storm plague, like the ones of old, begins to fall,
a curtain drawn across the Midwest as real as television,
no dials or knobs for vertical hold, the color lost, back to
black and white. The body of Christ cast down, a kite,
a sign to the holy, the lost wouldn't believe it, caught in a
blooming dogwood, colors exploding like Fourth of July.
They spilled out of the church to run in terror until the
young girls took out his nails and plunged them into their
lips and navels like piercings as they wailed with Isaiah,
the saved will become the lost on the Day of the Lord.

*Daren Dean received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His creative work and interviews have appeared in such places as the Chattahoochee Review, Deck, and Image (forthcoming). He is working on a collection of poems tentatively titled, The Sun of Arles. He teaches at Central Methodist University. He lives in Missouri with his wife and daughter.