Streetpreacher
I’ll be a street preacher for the new era,
pretty please,
holding up signs saying
‘You Are Loved’
and ‘You Will Be Saved’
with no fine print.
Come as you are
and come with whoever you’d like
and come however you like—
as long as it’s consenting.
I’ll be a street preacher for the new era
come to hear the good news?
We’ll fight for you
and love with you
and spend our time
learning what it’s like to live
in a new age
where fear doesn’t govern
and neither does God
nor does a fear of Godlessness,
the word heathen rendered defunct.
We chat, we jive
and swap our spit under summer moons
that glow our skin like fireflies
but they never flicker out,
not to you and not to me.
There was a time when we seemed doomed
the woes of seething street preachers and signs
within the clutch of wind-chapped fingers
blocking you and me from the corner store
reminding me of a past I longed to forget
and proclaiming we had to be saved
—your green eyes
and your body like an angel—
we realized we already were.
Antonio Cueva is a senior, English major, and Presidential Scholar at the University at Buffalo. Most of his free time is dedicated to arduously planning his medieval fiction series, but he also writes poetry, short stories, and songs.