Aug 10, 2011 | Bible Story, Cain, Gus Stevens, Sonnet, The Unspeakable Name vol. 1, Victorian Sonnet
My punishment is more than I can bear! He who finds me will kill me in the open field. Not so. Your crime, cannot cut short my care; your head will be, against such vengeance, sealed. And yet, from the ashes of Eden—length to length— you will roam the desert...
Aug 7, 2011 | Bible Story, Cain, Gus Stevens, Sonnet, The Unspeakable Name vol. 1, Victorian Sonnet
You claim you are not your brother’s keeper, but I detect the absence of a proper fear. What will you say when I raise the sleeper? Though you have ears to hear, you do not hear. I begged you not to join your father’s war and his dreadful crimes not to...
Jul 18, 2011 | Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme, Sonnet, The Unspeakable Name vol. 1
It has been the habit of your holy ones to grieve, their faces bent over an empty bowl, and in their fast they found you hotter than the cooking coal. Yet we can barely sit to pray, our stomachs full, and are lulled to sleep by a thousand bites; our bellies to our...
Jul 8, 2011 | Gus Stevens, Sonnet, The Unspeakable Name vol. 1, Victorian Sonnet
From the ashes of Sinai, He commands us to eat no thing that has not hooves but paws for earth itself fell victim to our hands; the ground grows thorns and the cat has grown claws. To think, the lion once grazed like a goat but now he stalks the young and ill to maul—...
Feb 13, 2011 | Bible Story, Cain, Gus Stevens, Sonnet, The Unspeakable Name vol. 1, Victorian Sonnet
The rising white of a blister on my hand is my blood guilt, my token from the fall— this and the damned weeds that curse the land with stains from our black revolt—our cabal with the snake against heaven’s highest king. Now everything is taken by the thorn and...
