Max Heinegg | Scarabs | Poets Resist | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Max Heinegg’s poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize. He’s been a finalist for the poetry prizes of Crab Creek Review, December Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Cutthroat, Rougarou, Asheville Poetry Review, and the Nazim Hikmet prize.

Max Heinegg's Website

Also by Max Heinegg: Night Fishing Buckler

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Swastikas in the Snow

Poets Resist
Edited by Kwame Opoku-Duku
September 30, 2019

Max Heinegg

Scarabs

We dreamed Pharaoh was flesh. Flesh can be endured. How we waited for him to pass in his glittering palanquin, censers perfuming the scentless desert; while we warned our children not to spy the veiled sun, he stared it down. How we accepted his one-sided wars with the Nubians, the abuses of his concubines, hearing him lord about what bows to use for hunting lions, or just to send his sons. We hoped the Nile would ferry his indignities, or return to its banks, but nothing changed. We woke fearing: Is this the morning he covers his slaves in honey, so he can eat without flies? Is this the day he burns our winter wheat? Is this the night he sates himself at the well of women’s tears? Friends say we’ll live to see his body washed & prepared, brain melted & pulled through the nose, the lungs & heart in isolated jars, the silvered vizier & the Devourer waiting as the scales finish judgment, the sarcophagus lifted through the antechamber; that with enough beer & onions, the workers will find every stone a place, & one glorious morning, anyone who wants to see that the empire’s still here need only look: the pyramidions & benbens intact. But on top of our world of sand, each dead remnant will have to be gathered. Good work we are ready for — beetles’ backs strong enough for boulders, like a god raising the dead sun to light the sky again.