How You Prove Anything and Everything

posted Feb 16, 2010

Faith prowls the accident scene hawking its wares, a shyster in search of clients. Police scour for evidence. Anthropologists dig for Darwinian theory, anything to tell the press. But the facts are two people are dead and a stranger called 911 and saved my life tonight. Yes, two people—one I will never know and the other I have forever all my life

and she me all her life. Creationists say God's will all the way, isn't it obvious, but witnesses say oil that has existed millions of years made this car skid. I can't buy a theory in this marketplace. A kid in an ice cream truck rings a bell and sings along with the tune. Hey, come on, you gotta have faith. Pascal tries to lay down a bet but before he can, people fight and shove like Christmas to buy out the kid's inventory on credit.

Paul Dickey's first full length poetry manuscript They Say This Is How Death Came into the World was published by Mayapple Press. His second book, Wires Over the Homeplace was published in 2013 by Pinyon Publishing. His poetry and flash have appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Sentence, Mid-American Review, Laurel Review, Potomac Review, Pleaides, and Bellevue Literary Review, among many other online and print publications.

Dickey teaches philosophy in Omaha, NE.

We’ve published two more poems by Dickey: “Against Pots” and “The Kindness.”