The Meadow Literary and Art Journal 2012

Morning, Las Vegas by Jane Rosenberg LaForge Look at me: I’m on narcotics, quoting Chekhov about guns. I can quote other men too, whose compulsions were so worthy they were driven to greatness. Not like me, pure of the body Yet besotted of spirit, since it Has taken me this lifetime to Learn that it was not the spirits Of great men that were besotted, But their material compositions. All the wafers and wine in this universe could not deliver them from corruption so they took up arms, or they took up gambling. I know how they feel, as depressed As a Las Vegas sunrise, the mustard seal on the dome’s horizon and the caking over of what used to be desert, but now is merely necrotic. They came for the uranium, to beat eternity, to be reborn as weapons, but they are as trapped under a crust of vellum and counterfeit wrapping as I am, like an echo prohibited from roaming from out of the infinite present. 6 the Meadow