Arid the Valley Through Which I Worry My Faith

Mornings I wrap my hand
around my pocketknife

& walk the fourteen steps

from my front door
to the driver’s-side door of my car

the small animals caged inside my gaze

scrabbling
before this snake of a place

A girl is pinned behind the wooden mask

of what you believe
you know

(sometimes to hold something deadly can be a prayer)

in the nave of my undoing
in the hard pew of my teeth

you are the word amen

spilling again & again
from the grave of my mouth

*

God’s Country

Out beyond the industrial park
a graveyard of cars

rusts toward the new
millennium. A girl

is running away from everything.

(What would you do
with the weight of a thousand eyes?)

This town like the nightshirt
clenched inside her fists.

The handmade sign beside the highway
ripples in the wind: Son we still love you

Jesus will take you back.

*

Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, forthcoming 2023). The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). An NEA arts fellow (poetry, 2019), she has previously published poetry, personal essays, and flash fiction in many literary journals. She lives in Indiana, and her work is constantly informed by and wrestles with the values and struggles of the rural Rust Belt. Her Christian faith is vital to her understanding of the world and her art.