Back to Issue 12
A glass marble rolling down the painted porch floor:
an act of forgiveness.
Rhythm lurching over every wooden seam:
a remembrance, an inertia.
God, you are my slanted velocity.
You are the black dirt of my childhood:
a graveyard of marbles.
On cool nights,
when you and I exhale, God,
out comes a joined body of shadow.
Together, we are so desired by the air
it ravishes the very prayers
we have for one another.
My prayer: moonflower and spade.
My spade: the sound of worship,
shushing against soil and glass
scraping grace for even myself.
You are the particles in the darkness of my body
in the darkness.
Your prayer: the wood, green leaf and bloom.
By Bethany Breitland
Bethany Breitland interrogates the buried structures of America. Her people are cult members, doctors, farmers, too-young mothers, bigots, and business tycoons. Her poems strike a match to her past in order to view class, religion, divorce, and the female identity from embered light. She lives at the end of a dirt road in Vermont.