Désirée Says, “There Were Crisis Actors at the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ”

I’m poolside in Tampa
with my new stripper friends
from the Déjà Vu Danceteria.

I’m talking about Doomsday again,
and we’re taking turns on the blunt
while listing our favorite scenarios.

You can always tell a lot about someone
by how they roll and how they want the end
to happen. Fire and ice are so passé.

Maybe nothing says more about American boredom
than by how well-fleshed we imagine Armageddon.
The dancers and I are splashing now,

shouting lavish demises: angels of punishment,
islands of cannibal horses, a vacant K-Mart
parking lot. We’re always elsewhere

when the shit goes down: in the romance
of airport hotels, the sluggish arms of local barflies,
beneath a big black sky opening in your hometown.

ξ

C. Russell Price is originally from Glade Spring, Virginia, but now lives in Chicago. They are a Lambda Fellow in Poetry, a Ragdale Fellow, a Windy City Times 30 Under 30 honoree, an essayist, and a poet. They are the author of a chapbook, Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other. Their work has appeared in The Boston Review, Court Green, DIAGRAM, Iron Horse Literary Review, Lambda Literary, Nimrod International, PANK, and elsewhere. Their full length collection oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems will be published in June 2022 by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.