Jacob Schepers

// [6 November 2024]

So it’s rage, then?
All this time I railed
against shame
but then there’s this.
I do get it, to go back
on previous statements
when I mused
how I wished
more for relief
from shame than
even peace
on the global scale
and for which
I now feel
guilty
and more than
a little naïve. That some
shame can indeed
be instructive,
even needed. Well,
it's tempting to say
FUCK POETRY
and Viva La Podcast,
red-pilled
bro
culture our national
export, our very own
trauma response—
American Made™—
to the haute couture
of the Nordic Model
of Scandinavian Socialism.
It's tempting
so many, such large swaths
of men, moths to a flame
licking the wings,
flickering the sparks back up
at us when our shaken dust
falls from above
and back into the fire.

// [12 November 2024]

Gimme profane.
Hit me
with obscene.
Tell me again
the family lore
regaled about
my grandfather
growing short
on patience
teaching misbehaving
young ‘uns
the love of God
and walking behind
them, smacking
their heads together
between his giant mitts.
Blast me
away like when I was
the high-school lead
in a production
of Godspell. See,
when time came
to flip over the tables
of the temple’s
money lenders
I yelled. When I tell
ya I yelled, I mean
I fucking screamed
a tooth-chipping yawp
Ronnie James Dio
would’ve gotten hard for,
even gotten off to. Got told off,
to turn it
down because the raw
rage excited
the crowd’s passions
towards the unfavorable.
So fragile
was the sentiment,
so Victorian
the virtue, the picture
of Christ was
one who wouldn’t deign
to base himself with such
an outburst in the flesh
while throughout
our own singular incarnations
you better bet
we feed our hearts with bile
and a steady diet of it.
Just last week to the day
many in that crowd
didn’t mind
a long con’s short grift
involving Bibles that would
be used to hammer
an abject and harder
point, as all lessons
grow sharp to a peak to prick
skin, making us
bleed, or puncturing
vital organs,
uncovering
our perforated bowels
seeping
fecal matter
into our bloodstream,
coursing through our core,
giving way
to sepsis, to shock
on the other side 
of awe.

Jacob Schepers is the author of two poetry collections, A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project, 2014) and Ugly Ground Swell Moss (Carbonation Press, 2026), as well as the chapbook Connections & Choreography (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and the micro-chap Shipwreck Abstracted (Ghost City Press, 2024). With Sara Judy, he co-edits ballast, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary journal. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife and their four children.

Banner Art:
Adolph Gottlieb, Primeval, 1962, The Art Institute of Chicago

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