︎








GENESIS POEM
by Jack Meriwether


In the beginning
There was newspapers
And iphone screens
There was a house I grew up in
And moved out of
There was talk radio
That you could see

In the beginning
There was newspapers
And iphone screens
But we thought these were no good
And so we smashed them
Into powders
The powders formed
A nonbiodegradable glitter
That we plastered on the walls
Of the house we lived in
The house glittered and shone
As we set about
To make it indestructible

There was also breakfast
And a heavy wooden table
In the beginning it was green
And white and orange
Lilac, topaz

There was no desire in the beginning
And then there was desire
After the beginning it was hand on skin
And hand on skin
And desire made forthright
After the beginning

I found a way
To say the painting made me feel
Like the sky was closing in
I found a way
To tell you about my headaches
It wasn’t easy
It was never easy in the beginning

I found a way to tell you
I don’t want wine with dinner
I don’t want gin fizz
I don’t want savory then sweet
I feel bogged down by my body’s insistence
On feeding, I want
A way to feel solid and lifted

There was the tanned sweater
With the holes in the elbows
That told me about time
There were those charcoal drawings
In the basement
And the leather pouches, the rattan chair

All of these things that pointed to
The body
And age
All of these accoutrements lazily plucked
My body in them
Told you something about time
And before the beginning there was god
And they were lonely
God was a father with no family

Before the beginning
God stayed up all night
Studying their notes
Trying preemptively to problem-solve
For humanity
How to fit intimacy in the body
Below the clavicle

On the day of the beginning
God slept in late
And said let there be brunch
They said let it be bottomless
They said order anything you want
In the beginning god was worried
They said oh god
Oh god oh god oh god
Oh fuck
What have I done











Jack Meriwether (b. 1992) is a poet and performance artist from Ohio currently living in Brooklyn, New York. They curate Bring Your Own Body, an ongoing reading and performance series hosted in their apartment since the summer of 2018. In 2020, they published a series of book-length poems titled The Panic Trilogy from The Garden