Tag: Faith

Four Poems by Spencer K.M. Brown

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I’VE HEARD STORIES

Like that landscape painter who pushed his goat hair
Brush across canvas for hours until two Coors
Cases were empty beside him and he passed out,
Waking to see some lonesome countryside more
Beautiful than he’d ever witnessed himself, as if
In delirium angels took pity, touched his art
With their golden fingers.
How one morning he felt something give
And pulled three teeth from his skull.
He keeps them in a cigar box,
The landscape hangs over a stranger’s fireplace.

Like my neighbor who only drank wine—
“Like Christ Hisself”—gallons at a time.
How he could turn gnarled stumps
Into foxes, honeybees, angels; how when he was carving
A crucifix for his parish he lopped off his left thumb
With the adze but never panicked.
Now that left thumb is in a jar on his windowsill
Catching light all day beside rosemary
He keeps trying to root in creek water.
The crucifix is still in the church, blessed now,
Where people come and kneel before it.

Like me—the nightmare I keep having.
Strapping my boys in the car, my breath
Toxic enough to blow a fuse.
Colors blended and beautiful but twisted
As a cottonmouth about to strike.
How I get in the car, despite the wind, the light,
My own flesh and blood tugging me back.
Then I turn the key.

I’m not blessed to make anything beautiful,
Not a landscape or stump,
Dust, and awaiting return—
For now, blessed only to wake.

*

IN A SILENT WAY

My wife digs her hands into black soil,
Flesh scraping against meat of the earth—
Brown loam speckling her pale, slender fingers,
Veins blue as heavy water, she takes hold of a root and tugs
Heavenward, commanding the earth by some grace
Bestowed by the very dirt she digs and tends.
The soil—like me, it writhes for her.

She runs a finger across a ring snake’s scales
As our son lets it slither between his fingers.
She dusts dirt from skin, gathers beans, tomatoes,
And sun-bruised flowers in her hands.
She touches my hand and says nothing.
Watches the garden, our boys—
She thinks of something I’ll never know.

She draws me from clay.
Her breath expands my lungs,
And how I wish I could grow roots,
Tree myself into this very ground
Where she will be tomorrow,
And the tomorrow after.

*

THE HILLS ARE QUIET BUT IS IT REST

It’s not the hills to blame for shrugging into hibernation.
Regress is grace, knowing when to be quiet,
When to raise your voice, given intention mirrors the divine.
But who’s to say buck-a-roo—
Now’s the time to make peace with worms, my grandfather said.
I wasn’t born bleak as him.
Grace is only slippery in greasy hands.
Drive enough nails and you’ll hit a thumb, God knows.
It’s in the picking up the hammer with broken hands though.
It’s in closing eyes and gasping a thousand feet deep.
Just know nothing is ever as imagined, not the weight of snow
On the cypress boughs, not the finger held over candle flame.
The worms know though—when to feast and fast.
The privilege is knowing the line that holds us,
Knowing when to still soul and close eyes,
When to unfold knife and get to work.

*

RUMORS OF WAR

I can’t stop thinking of the time coming when men will go mad,
Kill whoever isn’t insane like them.
My father used to tell me nothing good happens
After 10 p.m., he used to say drive like everybody else is drunk and on drugs.

He used to get up every morning at dawn, hair muskrat-wild,
Praying far deeper than the roots of any Judas Tree
For mercy, redemption, and mercy again.
I think about the mad people saying, “You are mad—You’re not like us.”

How they’ll bash skulls against curbs like drums
Keeping time to a rhythm droning in their ears.
All the way down, turtles and madness—
Except my old man, quietly escaping three wars:

Hearing, speaking, seeing.
How the one he keeps fighting—the one never
Televised, the one no one will ever tune out—
Rages in the heart.

The trick, he says, is to sit alone in a quiet room,
The room will teach you everything.

I’m a good citizen of this land. I do my part.
See—I pick up this inchworm, move it from here to there on the dogwood leaf.

*

Spencer K.M. Brown is a poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina where he lives with his wife and three sons. He is a finalist for the 2023/2024 CMA National Book Awards, and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and Flying South Prize. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Salvation South, Scalawag, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and the poetry chapbook Cicada Rex. His novel Recommendations for a Departing Soul is forthcoming from Regal House, (Fall ’27).

Agnosticism by Virginia Kane

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Agnosticism

At the exit I take for my lover’s home,
        someone has planted thousands of poppies.

Orange-red, they sway beneath a peeling Cracker Barrel billboard
        and a banner in all caps, demanding I repent.

Later, at the spiritual goods store,
        I search for Henry’s birthday present.

The punk clerk watches me finger calamus root, gold vials
        of prayer oil, Madonna statues poised like action figures,

answers my questions about tarot decks, rodent bones,
        match boxes stamped with the Sacred Heart.

In the end, I settle on a wax candle
        shaped like a massive cock, then wonder

what kind of person goes into a religious
        supplies shop and leaves with a gag gift.

I feel guilty the whole drive home, though
        and this makes me feel closer to God

since I was Catholic once, obedient
        as any blue flame commanded to burn.

Heading west, I decide that if I ever leave
        Appalachia, I’ll miss the highway signs,

violent promises on the hillside at dusk,
        neon yellow confidence that somewhere, hell awaits.

What I’m saying is, sometimes I sin
        just to feel like someone’s watching.

*

Virginia Kane is a poet and essayist. Her work has appeared in them., The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, The Baltimore Review, swamp pink, MAYDAY, The Shore, and on the Ours Poetica web series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she works at one store that sells new books and one store that sells used books.

Two Poems by Rachel Custer

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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.

Two Poems by Michael J. LaFrancis

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Assisted Living

Nan’s mother told her
she would not die from rust;

rather, she will pass away
when her life is all used up.

Her mother would live on
in her own home until she fell

out of it at ninety-three,
more than twenty years later.

Nan always said advice has to fit
the stage of life you are living in. Now

a nonagenarian herself, these words
are inspiring her. Nan has taken up

oil painting, bead making, praying on
rosary beads, calling neighbors by name.

After her husband of sixty-two years
gave up his spirit, she went to the cafeteria

at breakfast; the whole room came over
to extend condolences. Her heart heard

God’s promise—my house has many rooms,
I will prepare a place for you.

*

Cathedrals

We are centered,
in an ancient ecosystem,
of towering columns and spires
that seem to open heaven’s gate.

They are wearing a course red bark,
that can be one to two feet thick,
protecting their heartwood from fire,
Lucifer’s or anyone else’s.

They are fulfilling their promise,
with a quiet reverence, like apostles.
Their dark green and white ceilings
filter light, like stained glass windows.

Their parish is a connected community,
families surrounding proud parents;
some that have passed away.
Each is a resurrection from ashes and soot.

*

Michael J. LaFrancis is a trusted advisor, advocate, author and connector supporting individuals, groups and organizations aligning purpose and capabilities in service of their highest ideals. Writing poetry is a contemplative practice providing him with insight and inspiration for living a creative life. His poems are appearing in The City Key, Mocking Owl and Amethyst Review in the coming months.

LaFrancis’ hobbies include landscape gardening, nature walks, collecting fine art and writing. He and his partner Sharon are co-authors of their autobiography: Our Wonderful Life. They have two sons and have recently been promoted to being grandparents.

@michaeljlafrancis on Instagram

Two Poems by Tamara Madison

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Loss Litany
When did you lose your filter? a colleague asked that year before my retirement
when I couldn’t handle another senseless staff meeting.
When did you lose your virginity? a student asked, as though it were her business
but I told the truth so she’d know it doesn’t have to happen in high school.
When did you lose your father? a new friend asks and suddenly I feel remiss,
as though I should have kept better track of him.
The doctor wanted to know how: How did I lose the IUD? Did it fall out on the street?
he actually asked, until it turned up on the X-ray, half sunk in the wall of my womb.
I still wonder how I lost that diamond earring, the one generous gift a lover gave me
on a whim; its mate reclines now on a black velvet bier in the gift box it came in.
And how did I lose that friend from college, the one I reconnected with in two different
cities before he vanished into some far place where emails are read but not returned?
Of all of these, it’s the coffin-shaped fake ruby from the ring my mother wore
until she gave it to me when I turned 12 that I wonder most about;
the empty setting, silver filigree, rolls around every time I open the drawer
where I keep orphaned earrings and gifts I haven’t the heart to return.
I remember it on her strong, brown finger, and how it skewed to the right on my own,
how my sister in the throes of dementia used to stare at it, asking Mother?
Faith
You either have it or you don’t.
Sometimes it’s given, and you wear it like an amulet.
Sometimes imposed, and you bear it like a yoke.
Sometimes it’s just a name you repeat, repeat, repeat,
working to make it part of you; you take it in
the way a tree accepts and grows around a nail.
For some, it’s embodied in a wafer, a set of beads,
a sheaf of onion-skin pages in a handed-down book,
a scroll affixed to a door frame.
For some, an elusive spirit that vanishes
as they draw near; they spend their lives in the search.
I’ve lived this long without religion, yet
I breathe faith every morning when the sun rises; it carries me
through the days, a current bearing onward toward night
where I drift in my heart’s canoe along black water.
*
Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook “The Belly Remembers”, and two full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine”, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she has recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school. Read more about her at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.