Troubleshooting

Poetry by Caleb Braun

for Kyle Tolson

And when I saw my mom who is living
her final year shared
on Facebook a meme containing all

the greatest hits of Francis of Assisi’s quotes
just after my best poetry student submitted
a poem titled Francis of Assisi

in the coldest, rainiest week of Seattle January,
the streets soon filling with sinners
in clumsy jackets and all the electric swirl

of purple neon in the puddles, I knew God
must be one great big computer:
at some of the gates he’d say yes, enter

and others no with his motherboard lighting up
the night in the glitter of his trillion operations
and his web that holds us all in long blue ethernet cables

of love. And so they pulled a black fang
from my mouth the poem began
which was for me a hyperlink to Francis taming the wolf,

an art which he found easier than decoding
the darkness of people’s hearts,
those people like faulty software running past me in the rain

and the whir of wind which sounded like the feedback
loop of infinity, until the winter
sadness and death and a twelfth century saint

who died listening to David claim
when my spirit was overwhelmed within me,
then thou knewest my path clicked into view, proving

he had dropped me knowingly in the folder titled
Frequent User and then the next folder within named
To Troubleshoot — Send Signs

Caleb Braun holds an MA in English from the University of North Texas and is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Washington. His poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, The Boiler, and Gulf Stream Literary Magazine.