Some Angels
by Gary Percesepe
Some angels broke into my bedroom. Soldiers of the lord they called themselves. They spirited me off in my sleep, brutal wings flapping.
We landed on the roof of the house. They tossed shingles, calling them the pages of my life. The book of the roof, they cracked. From the roof we could see the shattered hulk of an abandoned ship, its hull barnacled and bleeding.
My sister and brother appeared, long dead beside my mother and father. We were led away, one by one in single file past the stairways of our beds. Deeper into our dreams, which clutched us like tree roots. In slow surrender, we tossed and turned through decades of damp night.
The dead swam in the dark. Suspension bridges built without pilings spanned the open sea, bobbing like corks in the ocean, bridge after bridge, complex strands of steel cables singing in the wind like giant harps, traffic less and stunning in their beauty. One angel gripped my forearm. Everything is made of time, even these clouds, he said. They merge and tear and pull away at last.
About the Author
Gary Percesepe is the author of eight books, including The Winter of J, a poetry collection forthcoming from Poetry Box in June, 2020. He is Associate Editor at New World Writing (formerly Mississippi Review), where has worked closely with Executive Editor Frederick Barthelme for many years. Prior to that, he was an assistant fiction editor at Antioch Review. His work has appeared in Atticus Review, Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, Westchester Review, Brevity, PANK, The Millions, Atticus Review, BULL, The Good Man Project, Word Riot, Necessary Fiction, and many other places. He resides in White Plains, New York, and teaches philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx.