On the Appearance of Angels
- On the Appearance of Angels
There are days I want to eat the moon,to tear it up with coffee-scented teeth,to flick it with my tongue. Swallow. Choke.Cough up little incandescent stars. On windy nightsin Baltimore, I wear sweatpants and a crown. I readstories online: refugee bans, boys-to-women-to-caskets,Marines share nude photos of female comrades.As cop cars made of salt speed down my cheeks,I ask myself if all the world is bad. Maybe not. I once readabout a soldier who met a black man for the first timeafter he was shot in Vietnam, his eyes tainted with sweatand grime, his blood congealing. As the black manhelped him to his feet, the soldier thought,This, this is what angels must look like. [End Page 44]
Alexis Sears earned her MFA in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her bachelor's at Johns Hopkins University. She was a 2019 Sewanee Writers' Conference Scholar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Hopkins Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
