Kevin Boyle

White Smoke

My wife and I have always celebrated the interregnum
between popes with a carnival after three days of mourning
for the dead pope, more if we loved his Roman numerals

or his face, then days of action without censure, no fear
of ex cathedra pronouncements about Mary or sin,
and we’d pray for a long conclave with gridlock

perhaps of one hundred days, and we’d begin
to sin ourselves with no papal eyes on us, offering
personal heirlooms to each other for a price—

a form of secular simony—or we’d pull back on our donations
to foodbanks, spending on our own forms of gluttony
with pasta at its base, we’d drink our red Sangiovese

in a false communion with Jove’s blood, and we’d lie
to each other and say April fools though it was November
or May (Mary’s month) until we didn’t know what we thought.

We’d cheat each other, me stealing from her purse and bag,
her fishing for change in my shorts I tossed in the wash,
or we’d take turns secretly shifting moneys around

in our crippled portfolios, not understanding what small cap meant,
though in the abstract we preferred a miter-sized large cap,
but she mocked my head size and took a scissors

to my baseball hat, unstitching the white from red.
We’d eat alone and leave the dishes
for the help to clean up, though there was no help

for us, and we’d sin with the flesh by poking around
on our own time, until we’d each find the other on his or her knees,
and ask, What is your prayer, and we’d say a quick lie about gold and crypto,

until finally we both revealed we just wanted to see the white smoke,
we had tired of sin, we needed a new pope from Eurasia
or Africa, the Americas—why not?—we wanted our lives back,

we wanted trust, and though we had joked during the carnival
about a five-some, when we heard the crowd on the webcam
in St. Peter’s let up a great cheer and the bells of a thousand churches

begin to ring, we made quickly for the white, white sheets and pillows,
and purified ourselves with a confession: we desired to lie together
even in the thirty-fifth year of our joint reign as monarchs

of our own world and the small garden and lawn
with hedges we take turns trimming back to size.
Welcome home, your Holiness, we said to each other.

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Kevin Boyle has published two full-length collections, Astir (Jacar Press) and A Home for Wayward Girls (New Issues Poetry Prize) and the chapbook, The Lullaby of History. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, Hollins Critic, Michigan Quarterly Review, National Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Boyle grew up in Philadelphia and now lives in North Carolina.