The Empirical Industrial Complex
Science is a cash register in the
department store of grace,
and I am seven cents shy of forgiveness. I
absently finger
the cruddy give-a-penny-take-a-penny but
it’s empty.
The clerk who smells like spirit of
hartshorn glares at me
like an alarm. There are no atheists in checkout
lines.
I
fall to my knees and take out my rosary beads. Decades
later, I realize checkout lines make
atheists of everyone,
atheists who believe in the handwritten
scriptures of data.
I shelf the forgiveness and leave. In my
car I count change.
Surely a qualification of omnipotence is
existence.
How much for a letter from a childhood
friend?
Surely an unidentified flying object has a
rational explanation.
How
much for that feeling in your gut when you see
someone you love in their underwear?
Bad credit? No credit? No problem
Jeffrey Paggi
Jeffrey Paggi is a 40-year-old High School
English teacher who lives alone in Highland, New York (although sometimes his 21-year-old
son comes to visit him). His work has previously appeared in The Chronogram,
Arc of a Cry, and The Cartographer Electric. In the late 2000s, he ran a poetry
reading series at The Belmar in Binghamton, New York. He plays guitar in the
post-punk band Cold Heaven and is currently working on a manuscript of poetry
called Riverwalker