When They Find the Ark

by Paige Lewis

Fox News buys exclusive broadcasting rights.My mother is sobbing, pressing her nails into my palm, she asks Is this live, is this live? When

they break their way into the ship, I swear I can smell a mixture of sweet dates and lupine. The men don’t need light. The ark is bright-

pulsing. Its floors—hay-dappled, wet-warped, buckling. Its stables are wide and filled with women. Women whipping around on all fours,

their heads pulled back, their mouths a frothed blur. Women sleeping straight-backed against wood beams, women speaking in trilling chirps.

My mother, even-breathing, says This can’t be the ark. Where are the bones? The men? The men find one woman alone in her stable, curled

beside an overturned bowl. The men lift her up, they lift it up. The bowl gushes dust and dust, the women stop moving, the ark starts

filling, and the men want to save it—no one wants to witness it dust-drowned. They throw the bowl out of the ark just before the TV goes

black. Outside, Lake Michigan is slopping up a thickening gray paste. Outside, the stones are coated. Inside, my mother sits replaying

the moments before the cameras stopped. As the clouds press against our roof, she asks Don’t you think the ones running look a little like me?

Paige Lewis is an assistant poetry editor at Narrative Magazine. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, The Greensboro Review, Ninth Letter, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere.