School teacher and you should too, Gale, she adds
after I tell her in class that Jesus
shouldn’t have killed that olive tree and those
pigs that plunged off the cliff and He wrecked
the inside of the Temple, all those o
-verturned tables and chairs and drachmas or
whatever they were, shekels maybe, all
because He lost His temper and if I
was a journalist back then, had been one
maybe that is, my headline would be or
maybe that’s would’ve been Jesus Loses
Temper in Temple, now that’s catchy.
I told her so but then she started to
cry. God damn it–who the Hell can be saved?
Gale Acuff
Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. His poems have appeared in Ascent, Reed, Arkansas Review, Poem, Slant, Aethlon, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Roanoke Review, Danse Macabre, Ohio Journal, Sou’wester, South Dakota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Texas, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Adirondack Review, Worcester Review, Connecticut River Review, Delmarva Review, Maryland Literary Review, George Washington Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ann Arbor Review, Plainsongs, Chiron Review, George Washington Review, McNeese Review, Weber, War, Literature & the Arts, Poet Lore, Able Muse, The Font, Fine Lines, Teach.Write., Oracle, Hamilton Stone Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, Cardiff Review, Tokyo Review, Indian Review, Muse India, Bombay Review, Westerly, and many other journals.
Gale has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.