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Tiamat and Marduk Share a Beer

Lisa Creech Bledsoe

I am busy not believing we are made of death. I can give up
primordial fear and awe if it means we finally change our story, where

all the statues are men holding guns and slapping the backs
of other soldiers and drinking to redemptive violence, hear hear.

Weather systems, battering rams, shot eight times, eight minutes
hammered home. The way to make it worse, to order and overcome

is to lead the children at gunpoint into the forest and leave
them there. The freezer contains the beer bottle explosion

and for a while everything is still. Except weather systems,
foster care, a thousand other bailouts and news grenades.

The tempest enters her mouth—is choking her in fact.
Rivers spew from her eyes. He is molding the world

from her blood and scraps because that is the story he knows.
But what if we took the guns from all the monuments and

led them out into the forest and left them there for say,
ten generations. Could we then talk, over beers, about why

we are drenched in a legacy of despair? What is happening
in Guatemala, Mississippi, Floyd county? We are each other

and the land, ribosomes, North Atlantic Right Whales, not
someone we can hate. The sea monsters aren’t who we think

nor are they so easily slain. Not slain at all, right down to
subatomic particles and the Big Bang. And more astonishingly

the dragon doesn’t call for our deaths. Let that sink in.
Have we ever received such forgiveness? So much frank possibility

not under our thumbs, our wrest? I’m busy planting mung beans and may be
doing this for the next ten years or more lives than that. It will

tax all our imaginations to see where once love boomed and rolled
before tectonic fractures drained and left us writhing. Who will heal

our self-rejection with dirt, a chaos of weeds, with air
that smells wet and full of blooms?

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