The Rapture is Happening Slowly, One at a Time, to Everyone

Poetry by Jeff Whitney

In an advertisement for a sex pill, the various couples enjoying pre-sex activities (riding in a hot-air balloon, bowling, clinking their glasses of wine) may be—are they?— generated by an intelligence that isn’t human. So now there’s this unease in the room, and no, we’re not ready for this kind of thing, are we? Artificial diamonds, fine. A meat made of vegetables? Preach. But soon our conversations will end with “Call me old-fashioned, but I like the people in my pharmaceutical commercials like I like my butter—real.” And what happens when a model knows too much about us, when it’s seen every episode of Full House, watched Dennis the Menace, learned everything there is to be gleaned? “Oh, brother,” it might say to some future version of us cobbled together from its weird dreams, about a park where dinosaurs were coaxed back to life, the lessons that weren’t learned then about meddling, about letting things lie, about not touching the golden statue deep in the tomb of the long-dead king. Because, yes, here we are, removing the sweat-stained hat from our head, focusing as we extend both arms to lift the forbidden object. After a while we might just forget what we’re doing. Then a sound will bellow forth from the jungle all over again. Maybe one day we’ll pick up the gleaming thing, and it will look like us almost: our strange and incoherent features reflected back, a winking moon. These things we cherished, and thought our own.

Published: May 12 2026 | Online 2026

Jeff Whitney

Jeff Whitney is the author of, among other chapbooks, Sixteen Stories (Flume Press, 2023) and Good Things Are Happening (GreenTower Press, 2026), winner of the Laurel Review Midwest Chapbook Contest. Recipient of a 2025 NEA fellowship, he has recently published poems in Alaska Quarterly Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review. He lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon. More at jeffwhitneypoetry.com. (updated 4/2026)