First Appearance of the Angel Evelyn
When the trumpets blow,
I will see her, the angel Evelyn,
lifted on a cloud,
air-jet transporting her
to heights. Pleasure is slight,
perfection interpreted.
She wants to be healed.
Please, grant her
that rare sex
that doesn't start
when it begins or end
when it is over.
Little Evelyn, soon an angel,
one maimed leg, I weep
to see it, the slight
drag of her right foot.
______
Sarah Sarai, pub. in ZYZZYVA
& included in The Future Is Happy, available at Amazon and Small Press Distribution.
An earlier posting also mentioned but didn't include full text of this poem: My 3,000 Loving Arms: Delirious Feminism
If there'd been a sign-up table in the theater lobby when I saw The Exorcist (opening day, without warning of what the movie was about), I'd be a Catholic. Damn, I love movies.
Eighteen years later I was similarly swept away in psyche. Michael Tolkin's The Rapture, with Mimi Rogers (who once married Tom Cruise, in itself scary).Tolkin's version of the Apocalypse stays close to the Bible. The Four Horsemen gallop along despite flying boulders and natural disasters. It's set in my L.A. - funky, as opposed to glossy - and nearby barren desert. So I was living in Seattle; my friend dropped me off after the movie; I went upstairs and wrote. I had intensely complicated relationships with my mom and with Los Angeles. When she was a little girl she had polio.
I wrote "The First Appearance of the Angel Evelyn" in my first or second year of poeming; it was my first published poem. Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZYVA, and John Marshall, co-proprietor of Open Books, made helpful suggestions. My mom was indeed religious, Christian, but not literal in interpretation; at all.
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