Apocalypse, by Will Cordeiro

St. John the Evangelist on Patmos, by Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlands) 1485.

​
Apocalypse
 
John the Revelator transcribes
the language of an angel.
His prose so elevated, so spidery
and crabbed, that no one’s managed to distinguish
whether it portends the fall
of Rome or future end times, antiquated
figures or some ensorcelled crystal
ball which any fool could read
into. In Bosch’s canvas, the usual menagerie
of lepers, wraiths, skullduggery, lechers, bats, and beasts
are nowhere to be seen for once—except
in the corner lurks one bedeviled critter…  
 
An ordinary day,
devoid of danger. John dips his pen
and turns back to the angel.
A ship, like history, burns upon the river.

Will Cordeiro

Will Cordeiro has work appearing or forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He co-edits the small press Eggtooth Editions. He is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer’s Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. He received his MFA and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Will currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.