I appeared
in the afterlife
to my parents
as a character
on a daily television
soap opera
about a rustic town
named Mill Creek
where the rocky creek bed
looks more like
the colored pebbles
in the bottom
of a fishbowl.
I was a young doctor
who used
special surgical tools
to remove
the scorpions
that produced
stinging words
from people’s throats
and employed CRISPR
to splice Libra
or Gemini genes
to any infant Scorpio’s
double helix.
copyright © 2023 Kenneth P. Gurney
Umflop 