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Her Own Kind of Cloister

In the empty twilight of an overcast Monday afternoon, Elizabeth took the Lord’s name in vain. Loudly. Aggressively. The whole sanctuary reverberated with her “God fucking damn it!” It bounced off every pane of stained glass, every sacred icon, every wood-carved cross. It seeped into the vestments of the altar. It greased the candles.

A goose-egg pushed up under the skin where she had cracked her forehead on the pew while polishing the linoleum beneath. She saw stars, which, until that moment, she’d thought only happened in cartoons. Her breath caught in her chest; she felt dizzy. She clutched her dust rag in one hand and the broom handle in the other as she eased onto the seat behind her. Good God she needed a drink. She hadn’t thought she would so soon. Not here. The dispatcher at the cleaning service where she worked had put Elizabeth on the church circuit permanently. Quiet, reliable, respectful, responsible. Trusted not to nick valuables from the vestry. All reasons why she sat there now, with a splitting headache, blaspheming and craving alcohol.

At first, she had thought she might like the new assignment. The noble reverence of tidying-up the house of God. Or rather, as it turned out, seven houses of God. Scheduled by management for 31 hours per week to avoid having to pay her benefits, she’d have to bust her ass to get them all in appropriate condition by Sunday morning. Every week. She hadn’t thought it’d be bad. She wasn’t afraid of hard work. In fact, hard work in a solitary, spiritual environment seemed like just the kind of thing she needed to get her life back on track. Her own kind of cloister.

But she hadn’t really known what she was getting into. The buildings were old. Dust settled on every surface at a pace that matched the silent snowfall outside. Candlewax drips pocked the burgundy carpets. Smears of peanut butter tainted 80% of the surfaces in the nursery. At least one Styrofoam cup, half filled with pungent coffee and ringed in old lady lipstick, lay tipped over in every. Single. Trash can. And the stench in the bathrooms curdled the air to the point she could not even imagine how God fearing people could make such a stink.

When she’d spoken to her sponsor about how the position was not at all like she thought it would be, he reframed the situation for her and gave her a different perspective: She had steady work. Work that was safe, fairly paid, and respectable. She had the health and well-being to complete the tasks asked of her. She was quite far ahead of so many that he sponsored. She just needed to get used to this new life. This better life.

The stars faded, dawn breaking. Elizabeth fingered the new topography of her scalp and took a deep breath. She stood and found her balance steady. Padding noiselessly down the carpeted aisle, she made her way toward the back stairs that connected the altar to the kitchen below. Maybe she could find an ice pack in the freezer to take the swelling down. But she didn’t make it to the steps. The unassuming closet tucked in a tiny room just off the pulpit distracted her. She could feel the pull of the elements through the knotty pine door. The ungreased hinges and hitch in the latch announced her trespass.

She wasn’t much for theology. She didn’t know if Christ was really here; if it was somehow really blood in that clear glass vessel. If it was, it could just as easily be her own. Poured out and sitting, locked away, on a dusty shelf. Waiting to be consumed. Warm and sweet, the wine slid down her throat. As she finished the bottle, the ache in her head migrated to some chamber deep down inside that she could never quite tidy up.

 

 

Marsha Timblin received and MFA from Chatham University and her work has appeared in The Occulum, Cold Creek Review and Boston Accent Lit. She writes fiction from her home near Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her husband, son and Shiba inu puppy. Follow her on Twitter @MarshaLena.

Pan-Cake Day

Winter’s time is running out.
We’ve got it in a corner, trapped and on the ropes.

Its fangs are out, now,
Weaving and striking for the throat,
Claws out
And pale with desperation.

That final slice of predatory cold
Glints in its eyes,
On the windows,
In the fires,
While winter waits on its whiplash spine
Intent on the creeping ring of flame
We lit to kill it.

It knows that everyone will eat its blackened skin
Bleached on the bone and crispy with lemon

And now its time is running out
With everybody’s finger on the trigger.
The cold is cowering and everyone is laughing
As we shuffle forward in our huddled lines
Holding hands while winter spits
In our eyes, looking for the undone button, the naked flesh.

But it has no hair
And it is running out of time
And it knows it.

 

 

Edward Alport is a proud Essex Boy and retired teacher. He occupies his time as a gardener and writer for children. He has had poetry published in a variety of webzines and magazines. When he has nothing better to do he posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

Hibernal

Late February, the darkness
ecumenical beneath the night’s new moon.
Another norther filigrees

fallen leaves and windowpanes
with a delicate, light frost.
Why draw a line between

the living and the dead
on such a night, when the darkness
within everything everywhere

acknowledges itself?
One stares through a window
at the allusive, bituminous view,

a ghost of breath upon the glass,
once again the unborn child who,
after six months in the womb,

opens his eyes for the first time
and finds the comprehensive darkness
the mother holds within herself.

 

Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, High Plains Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Sewanee Theological Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Antigonish Review, and Columbia Poetry Review, among other publications. He won Descant’s Baskerville Publishers Poetry Award in 2018. He lives in Waco, Texas.

Saffron Monk

The saffron monk sits still
Upon the bench of wood
Feet tucked
Wrapped round and round in streams of cloth
Rippling rivers rise

He is a mountain
A hive of bees
Honey held sacred within his soul
His chant a buzzing calm
His offering

He is a giant cinnamon bear
Warm and rough giving way
To wait
It is not yet his time
Patient, he will not disturb the fish
And reverent, hums

 

Heather M. Browne is a faith-based psychotherapist, recently nominated for the Pushcart Award, published in the Orange Room, Boston Literary Review, Page & Spine, Eunoia Review, Poetry Quarterly, Red Fez, Electric Windmill, Apeiron, The Lake, Knot, mad swirl.  Red Dashboard published two collections: Directions of Folding and Altar Call of Trumpets.

Whisper

When sky is baby blue
and the clouds mirror newly fallen snow,

white fluffs clean and crisp,
tucked in around all edges, a comforter

matching robin’s egg, and the trees,
who whisper to each other

constantly, trunks gently swaying,
branches bare, but not brittle,

what are they saying?

 

Marjorie Moorhead writes from a New England river valley, surrounded by mountains and four season change. She is an AIDS survivor, and mother, who tries for a daily reverent walk. Finding a voice in poetry has brought Marjorie much joy, and a needed sense of community. Her work is found online at many journal sites, in several anthologies, and two chapbooks.

Red letter days

Before I could hold my head upright, I’d been
going to church every week – nestled in a corner
of the Sunday school room, snug in a baby seat,
a beatific smile radiating peace, at Christmastime
reminding the older children of our infant Lord.

Later I grew curious, asked questions of God
he seemed unable to answer. I wanted to know
why the teacher at the new church said I’d
go to hell if I didn’t say the words just right
to ensure I’d be saved. My grandmother tutted

and said boy, you only need the red letters. I would
read them, embroidered fine among the black
and white, poetry in scarlet ink – old words in
an old order. Father forgive them; for they know not
what they do. The words as Jesus spoke them, a

gift to us: as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
And over time I discovered new expressions of love,
that later bought me disapproval, even as I breathed
his fine merlot words and felt a honey sting – devotion
not guilt, staying drunk on joy for as long as I could.
  

 

Quotes in italics from the King James Version – Luke 23:34; John 13:34

 

Kate Garrett is a writer, witch, mama, and drummer who sometimes haunts 450 year old houses (as a heritage volunteer). Her next book, A View from the Phantasmagoria, is due out in October 2020 from Rhythm & Bones Press. She lives halfway up a hillside in Sheffield, England. www.kategarrettwrites.co.uk

Dreams are for the Morning

Another night twisted into my skin.
Heat fits to the window
like a sheet of steel.
Pillows a miasma,
covers swamp and ooze.

Until water threads the gutters,
and in letting go scatters morning
unexpected as the drift of coffee
through the kitchen. God
walks slowly on the grass.

 

Carolyn Oulton has been published in magazines including Acumen,Artemis, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, from the edge, Ink Sweat & Tears,Nine Muses, Orbis, The Poetry Village,The Moth and Seventh Quarry. Her most recent collection Accidental Fruit is published by Worple Press. Her website is at carolynoulton.co.uk

Conversation with my guts after looking at the tangka of the wrathful god Aksobhya, a buddha associated with transforming anger:

I see you, my guts, in all your wrathful glory!
Your red rivers and rivulets reach out in a ring around me,
circling and radiating heat and inflammation!
In the center is the image of your guardian deity,
a dancing man with three eyes open wide,
one in the middle of your forehead,
a fierce frown on your face,
you wear a sash of decapitated heads
all looking startled, like Nearly Headless Nicks
all in a row.

You dance in your gold and turquoise pointy shoes
atop a giant tiger who holds two victims in its paws,
one male and bloody,
the other a naked female twisting to please the tiger.
You hold a dagger, scorpion, chalice,
waving them to cut through whatever needs cutting through.
All this takes place on a bed of lotus flowers
in a lake in which skulls float by in groups of three.

Above you is a strange birdlike creature with arms,
who sprinkles confetti of powerful truths as she flies.
The sky overhead is deep blue with wondrous swirly clouds in the distance.
The whole picture is surrounded by geometric designs like a
triumphant brocade, whose gold and green and blue lines seem
to trumpet from the red background that royalty is here, now.

As I sit here honoring the years you have been all wrapped up
inside my guts, waiting to be celebrated and released
I marvel at your strength, your patience, your power!
Where shall we go together on the mighty tiger with the green eyes?
What wicked shall we extinguish and burn up?
What cool pools shall we swim in?
What will our song and dance be?

 

Sara Epstein is a clinical psychologist from Winchester, Massachusetts, who writes poetry and songs, especially about light and dark places. Her poems are forthcoming or appeared in Silkworm, Paradise in Limbo, Mom Egg Review, Chest Journal, Literary Mama, and two anthologies: Sacred Waters, and Coming of Age.

Vanishing Point

Safe in the lifeboat
but still leashed to the ship,
I cut the binding rope
so I can float free.
The sky and sea consume me.
I blend into their hues of blue.
No longer afloat,
I sink into the horizon.
Then, born again, I rise over high waters
to the merciful Heaven
that awaits my freed Soul.
I ceil the sky.
I shroud the sea.
Their Holy blues define me
in my grave Divine.

 

Cynthia Pitman has had poetry or prose published in Amethyst Review, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Arts (Pushcart Prize nominee, 2019), Third Wednesday (contest finalist), Vita Brevis, Leaves of Ink, Ekphrastic Review, Adelaide Literary Review, Right Hand Pointing, Dual Coast Magazine, and others. Her poetry collection, The White Room, is forthcoming.