Canon

Butt Johnson

On a shelf above the Ark, where a cherub, deploying tamed cyclones, supervised the dusting, God set his beloved collection of shrunken heads.


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What he had constructed contained all the necessary elements for levitation, but his ascension was thwarted by an opaque cloud of words.


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He might have slept, but the thump of blades on wood startled him, and the muffled screams ahead, and the fighting not to lose his place in line.


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She was reading a book on the bus: soldiers, betrayals, executions; it absorbed her as the bullet smashed the window just before her stop.


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All she found was vital, anything en masse a collection. After years, from the weight of the massed material (string, paper, dust), the house mutated.


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They wrote a wall in the forest; ages they raised it, letter by letter, and in the end they stood behind it, but the enemy was illiterate.


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The slaves brought stones from a quarry; they were made to shape them, pile them up, and ascend, blindfold, the stairway of their own sweat.


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Moonlight through the harp cast a shadow of the angel gathering poems from the desktop, sucking their souls through to Poetry.