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Future Saints

by Terese Mason Pierre in Uncanny Magazine Issue Thirty-Nine | 391 Words

But who would pray to you,

supply your canonization?

 

First, all is muted, a green,

speckled wash, and a balding man

has just heard the worst news of his life,

and your name comes to him as gently

as a silver blanket placed on

the face of a planetless child, the cry

for help not half doubting.

 

Second, a black hole opens itself

to the uninitiated, stars and glass

still in sameness, the woman

finds herself trapped, and your name

is patterned in the dripping waves,

the illusory scrabble of life, the clicking

of tree branches against universal rock;

you drag each other behind, cold.

 

Third, everything has decayed—

art that now wears black and a

reaching forward; there seems to be

a fire in both the distance and future,

some collective ripped from prestige.

They chant your name, call upon you

for miracles, the divine ignored for

wailing passion, the solitary life,

the panting immortality of the sky.

© 2021 Terese Mason Pierre

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Terese Mason Pierre

Terese Mason Pierre is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Fantasy, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, and Star*Line, among others. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Elgin Award, the Aurora Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize, and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is an editor at Augur Magazine, a Canadian speculative literature journal, and co-Director of AugurCon, Augur‘s biennial speculative literature conference. She has co-hosted poetry reading series, spoken at conferences, organized literary events, judged writing contests, and facilitated creative writing workshops. She is the author of chapbooks, Surface Area (Anstruther Press, 2019) and Manifest (Gap Riot Press, 2020). Terese lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Visit her website at www.teresemasonpierre.com.