[from All the Messiahs (8)]

We were carrying the pieces of a body round with us and the phone kept ringing, and we shouldn’t have answered it. How was it even ringing? At first we were going to burn it. Then I said we should throw it all down into an oil well. He said he knew we’d done it and he was coming for us. That’s all. Mom led us up, slowly, into green slanting fields. Up into trees——cold, red and white——like cathedral meat. There was no way out, but we kept trying.

[from All the Messiahs (9)]

The wind, blazing, seizes us in rage and need. Simmers and sweats. Slinks away. Rises up. Dances on your head. Curls up in a cage. The Romans pulled a man’s skin up over his head while he was still alive. I’m in bed, suffering. The doctor says it’s sexual trauma.

[from All the Messiahs (10)]

It’s raining outside. Covers draped over you like Michelangelo’s Pieta. I can hear the music of small birds. Mary’s young. You are warm. Eggs inside you. Miracles come and they go. Each time they hatch you kill them. I’m searching for just the right kind of blue. Here in the rain, next to you.

[from All the Messiahs (11)]

We haggled over his tiniest bones and hair in a small room with a big painting. Cars and trashed swirled round. A man with a ram’s horn——a trumpet!——behind his back. It courses through you, tingling. And it turns everything black.

Rauan Klassnik’s first book Holy Land was released April 2008 from Black Ocean. His e-chapbook "Ringing"( rauanklassnikringing.com) has since released from Kitchen Press. Rauan's poems can be found at Coconut, Action Yes, Typo (coming soon), Eleven Eleven, No Tell Motel and other online and print journals.