P.W. Bridgman lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada. His third and fourth books—Idiolect (poetry) and The Four-Faced Liar (short fiction)—were published in 2021 by Ekstasis Editions. Mr. Bridgman’s writing has appeared in, among other literary journals, The Galway Review, Ars Medica, The Moth Magazine, Skylight 47, Poetry Salzburg Review, The High Window, Litro UK, Litro NY, The Honest Ulsterman, The Literary Lawyer, The Canadian Poetry Review and The Maynard. His work has also been republished in anthologies released in Canada, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and America. Mr. Bridgman has given in-person readings in several Canadian cities and, as well, in Dublin, Glasgow, Belfast, Melbourne and New York. You can visit his website at http://www.pwbridgman.ca and follow him on Twitter at @PWB_writer1.

Not Again. Yes, Again.

An already leaden sky has darkened again, is crowded again with the thoughts
and prayers which propel skyward a gushing fountain of carnations,
bone splinters, indignation (righteous and not), a blackboard brush,
hymnals, communion wafers (so many communion wafers),
sock monkeys and Paddington Bears as yet un-weathered
by wind and rain, blood-spattered Lego pieces, brass
shell casings, Hello Kitty backpacks, self-serving
rationalisations, single-serving Frosted Flakes
boxes, moist divots of hair and flesh rudely
dislodged from earnest little foreheads,
books, coat hooks and Sandy Hooks,
missals, dismissals, an army boot,
a St. Christopher’s medal torn
from a bloodied neck chain,
a Second Amendment, a
First Communion gift
bracelet, a ham ’n
cheese sandwich
pierced by
ordnance,
a fortune
cook-
ie
.

All of it thrust heavenward as if by a tornado. All of it a swirling and violent funnel cloud, a roiling miasma of human detritus, of moral torpor, of tragedy, of blinkered denial. Regard the towering spume of grandiloquent platitudes, borne aloft on thermals fuelled jointly by the hot exhalations of the pistol-packing evangelists and by the shallow, laboured breathing of the impotent handwringers—

All of them lily-white enablers, some of them professional mourners,
all of them contented and cemented into their plush-cushioned pews.

Thus ascends the pungent fecal jet of thoughts and prayers, rising on potent updrafts of sanctimony—its widening gyre of resignation and misery casting off, centrifugally, the bone shards, the blood, the shattered first communion bracelets, the bullet-ridden backpacks and fleshy hair tufts of the lost ones—human detritus that, like space junk, smites the face, the pock-marked face, of Their Indifferent God. Of Their Modern American God—who shifts with a groan from one cellulite ham to the other in his celestial shiatsu recliner, reaches for the remote and switches the channel from Jimmy Swaggart reruns to Fox.