Doctrinal Shuffle
In the nakedness of civic planning
a few secular aims overwhelm
whatever any god could have deemed
the key components of human subsistence—
none of us knew what was
coming next, not being privy to
the lofty paper-pushing that informs such
distilled machinations. But
a sense of brotherhood issued
an imprint of unity and so kept enough of us
content and out of the way. The next
step wasn’t clear but conditions
were ripe—since it didn’t completely
crush anyone the ground was laid
for proceeding into thicknesses none
had the basic skills to sift through,
so we decided to just leave it on its own.
Hassan Melehy lived all over the United States before settling in North Carolina in 2004. His poems have appeared in The Hat, nthposition, and Prelude, among other journals. His first collection, A Modest Apocalypse, was published by Eyewear in 2017.