Paul Jolly was raised in Oakland, and, after a thirty year detour on the East Coast, returned to Berkeley in the summer of 2019. His poems have appeared in Permafrost, the Columbia Review, and Straylight. His first book, Why Ice Cream Trucks Play Christmas Songs, was published by Fernwood Press in December of 2018.
Miracle drugs
Sunlight through clouds, taa-daa! Trumpet
fanfares in the lab window, refracts
on beakers and test tubes. Lab
drudges halt their rote to compare
charts with angels. The apothecary
cleric’s shelf recently held a smatter
of cures: saints’ relics, holy
water, tinctures, unguent. Now
many shelves hold baskets and baskets,
loaf baskets, fish baskets.
High church muckety mucks
(mucks at least) preside at drug
trials. The mucks want crutches
heaved by healed cripples, billion
dollar profits, Nobel prize, handicapped
stickers discarded from cars. Proof
requires reams of forms. Check
miracle type: blindness cure,
hemorrhage plug, cripples walk,
or the Lalapalooza: Lazarus alive
post-flatline. And randomized
samples! No chocolate sampler
was ever so random. Did placebo
-takers get prayed at same as druggies?
Did all the docs carry the same tracts
in their grand round lab coat
pockets? Did prayer warriors spout
glossolalia in the same dead language?
Was there a between-shifts non sectual
moment of silence at the nurses station
in each clinic? Identical hymns, time
-release capsules, scriptures, syringes,
Hallmark prayer cards, patches, inhalers,
beads, inhibitors, enzymes, chants,
implants? Double-blinders want to know:
Was the philanthropist who endowed each hospital
faithish? Does a buried urn in the arid
land of Genesis hold test results that went
wrong for pharma, papyrus
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