At a Seaside Town on Tuesday, April 25, 1347 by Tom Holmes

The town’s butcher prepares
cattle in the street. Children carve
dice from his discarded bones.
Three times she yells “Look out below”

before emptying her chamber pot
from the top window. People look
up. The full moon rose just before
noon and nearly bumped the sun.

People leap over blood
and dung, and rats, they are done
with decaying flesh. They burrow
deep with their fleas and infection.

The local astrologer predicted
earlier the arrival of crying
snake eyes and gas. A scream
“The fleas have bitten me”

from the cemetery where coffins rise
and tumble headstones. Hills sink.
The sea with merchant ships brushes
the sun. sailors and merchants whisper,

just in time, prayers. Beneath the sea
waves, the city darkens, disappears,
destroyed. The heaven to whom all confess
speaks, “Here I am death,” harps play,

earth coughs a poisonous wind.

Tom Holmes is the curator of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. Holmes is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including The Book of Incurable Dreams (forthcoming from Xavier Review Press) and The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, and four chapbooks.