From the Grapevine

—sonnenizio on a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I should learn, in some quite casual way
that Christ had come again, another way,
and you had kept this news, as always, to yourself.
If you had said He rolled my joint and, anyway,
you don’t believe a thing I say. What a way to answer.
Take away your liver-loving, coffee-chugging
credibility—as you sit sideways
on that Methodist folding chair, in no way
twelve steps closer. Then return to your half-way house
in the hills, survey the vineyard, the way
the vines snake along the wire, no wayward
climbing here. Bypass the steps, the one-way path
inside—when all you crave is out. Your runaway
plans, or not, I’ll score you pot as you waste away

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JILL KLEIN is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College, after years of raising teenagers and an earlier career as a corporate banker. She has poems published or forthcoming in Borderlands, Cold Mountain Review, Rattle, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her engineering husband.