Before All Things

              Col 1:17

The day Christ died a record-long freight train

barreled through the Rollins Road crossing.

For seven minutes tankers and lumber flats

vibrated through the spikes in his wrists.

A fisherman dropped his pole by the retention pond

and headed toward the hill. A girl at a bus stop

clutched her side as the embryo implanted himself.

We’ll be late for the movie, I said.

That night, a meteor lit a tongue of fire

over the Midwestern sky. Our kitchen flashed,

and you froze at the sink. Christ was just born,

you said. I ground my best coffee as an offering

and kept watch through the night. Legion roared

through the maple leaves. The Pharisees’ stones

thudded to the ground. The loaves in the kitchen

ruptured their bags, then the earth burst into being.

~Tania Runyan