Exhortation for any Innocence that Remains

            Warning bell of a child, still, unwrung
as yet by what a tongue can hold, or what
            can hold a tongue: let yourself be small.

            Spent match, fire in another man’s belly,
word-weight in a dead language, rise up!
            O exhale-born, o hymn-child, humming home

            bearing your own song, held word (life
meaning what’s said, what’s said meaning
            what’s heard), rise quietly, like heat

            in a cheek burned first by turning. Warning
bell rung, unring yourself, become the truth
            that binds another’s tongue, enter first

            into any room as the haunt in a quarry’s eyes,
as a threat felt from behind. Dark child, planet
            eclipsed, waiting like a star waits out the day,

            let nightfall swallow all the drowning light.
Come forth, and when you come, come as you are,
            small and deadly, thrust Godward like a fist.

*

Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2003) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, ONE ART, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com and songsonthewaytogod.substack.com.