Sara Moore Wagner | On Everything They Left Out | Poets Resist

Sara Moore Wagner lives in West Chester, OH with her husband and three small children. She is the author of the chapbook Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Tar River Poetry, Harpur Palate, Western Humanities Review, Glass Poetry Journal, and Nimrod, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart prize, and Best of the Net.

Sara Moore Wagner’s Website.

Also by Sara Moore Wagner: Hooked Through Domestic Pantoum Investigating the Shudder

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Penelope Complex

Poets Resist
Edited by Jemshed Khan
May 17, 2019

Sara Moore Wagner

On Everything They Left Out

for Susan Pompeo, wife of Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State They told you about the rapture too early, you were young, didn’t know what it meant to be taken out, taken up like a cup of the sweetest tea, put to the lips of God. To be good enough to be removed like your grandmama’s heirloom garnet ring we pinched from her finger just before they shut the lid. When you get raptured, you’ll leave your best Sunday clothes, bodiless on the bed for the old perv neighbor to find later when he’s looking for someone else to take him. Or maybe it’s your sister who never would close her eyes at prayer — she’d be tongue-out watching the biscuits, would lunge at the final amen, & you just knew she’d never get a miracle, even if she got all the biscuits in the basket, even if she’d been born a man, a patriarch, a papa. & even then, God picks whose concealed handgun is righteous, who carries the word of the Lord in him like a bullet — who’s ready to aim it for his will, thank-you-Jesus. Later, they tell you: you can’t ever know the exact day and time, so you walk around saying it’s now, it’s now, it’s over, because you don’t want it to be over. Yesterday, you took all the lush peonies off your neighbor’s bush, you squashed a fat ant between your thumb and forefinger, you shook a menstrual clot in your hand, all jellied and big as a cat’s eye marble, & you looked for an egg to roost over as if the whole sky or God could have been an egg. Remember Elijah, his consumed offerings, his body ascending in clouds. Remember David, or Moses. Remember Pastor McCarty, how he put his hands around a boy’s neck until you could see all his teeth and gums, & wasn’t he the one who said what gets left behind. And isn’t he the one God chose to stand over your shoulder or in front of your open book to tell you just when you’ve got it all wrong.

This poem deals with the evangelical obsession with the rapture, with gun rights, and with dictating what women should do with their bodies/feel about politics based on the idea of preparing the world for the second coming. It’s addressed to Mike Pompeo’s wife, as I was inspired to write this after reading this article. I was also raised evangelical, so I know how it feels to live in the shadow of the rapture.