Play the lottery. Pray all you like.
Odds are, tomorrow you’ll be stuck
in some basement washing socks.

Remember when we let Jesus
into our hearts? That lasted, what,
three months? Now we’re on eBay,

selling industrial corn starch
in jars labeled Muscle Builder Max.
Between shipments we smoke hash

with Randall the midnight janitor.
When stoned, he can’t shut up about
making America great again.

What Randall doesn’t understand
is that America is Jesus, that Jesus
isn’t coming back, that when Jesus

leaves your heart he leaves it worse
than he found it—punched-in walls,
rooms crammed with fast food bags,

plumbing & electric shot to shit.
Meanwhile, millions of adolescent boys,
keenly sensing where the future’s at,

set their sights on getting ripped.
Don’t forget the heart’s a muscle, lads.
We’re here to help with that.

Owen McLeod’s poems recently appear or are forthcoming in Field, Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, New England Review, Sycamore Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is a potter, a professor of philosophy at Lafayette College, and he lives in eastern Pennsylvania.