Monthly Archives: December 2024

Heartfast
after the visions of Catherine of Siena

The color of beloved is red. I’ve bathed in it, his lambsblood—
	worn his foreskin ‘round my
finger; what better gift is there for a lordsbride than four 
	wounds: father, son, holy spirit—I
knifed my hair, threw food in the fire, wrapped my mother’s
	wishes ‘round the legs of fledglings 
	and shoved
	them from the nest.

If the mind is a cell, then what is a heart? A pyre made by blue
	wefts, palm-eerie, so easily snuck out
of a chest. I neglected it—scarletstone of my own, I prayed
	for hollowness, for the whirl of ashes,
prayed for cleanness notyetseen. Christ-beloved planted a thrum
	with his thumb. His holy heart so hot—
	wanted by all 
	but buried in me. 
.
I try to speak of it, but the tongue does not know this dance. I
	can show you, instead, my flesh: ribscar 
smiling beneath my breast. Touch these bones after I am dead.
	Starlight is but a dew drop compared
to God’s love, hot. I spend hours seeking to name it. My heart. 
	My whispering bloodpeach. Christ
	tells it a secret
	before he hides it in his sleeve.
 

Kale Hensley is a West Virginian by birth and a poet by faith. You can keep up with them at kalehens.com.

Shrine

The deeper in our cave we go, the more
the nature of a shrine comes clear. A house
on stilts, a cabin on a Blue Ridge slope,
a lodge in view of Everest, the same.
A wikiup, a yurt, a sidewalk tent,
the same. A white house, red house, blue house: shrines,
cenotaphs, and sometime mausoleums.
Some people think of them as coliseums
where rivalries play out, bright armor shines
and clashes until every strength is spent.
Some people light a candle, watch the flame,
see promise in it or, at least, a hope
for friend or sibling, parent, child, or spouse.
I feed the fire to hear the heartwood roar.

Dan Campion’s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review. He is the author of A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press, 2022), The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024), and the monograph Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press, 1995). He is a coeditor of the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press, 1981; 2nd ed. 1998; 3rd ed. 2019). His poetry has appeared in Able Muse, Light, Measure, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Shenandoah, THINK, and many other journals.