After the Fall

She told me I was dirt. A muckball on the face of the green earth. Then she pointed her finger. “Look at yourself.” (I was standing in my old checkered robe, three days of stubble on my face, eyes baggy, hair unwashed.) “Who would ever want you?” I reminded her that man was an exceptional kind of theophany, a copula mundi. Because he was made in God’s image, his innermost being shared in divine unknowability. “No more copulas for you, buzzo,” she shot back and slammed the door on her way out, leaving me sagging like a thirsty plum, exiled in postlapsarian dust.

Askold Skalsky

Askold Skalsky’s poetry has been appeared in numerous small press magazines, most recently in Southern Poetry Review and Notre Dame Review. He has also published in Canada, Ireland, and Great Britain. Originally from Ukraine, he teaches English at a community college in Western Maryland.