Poets of Faith

February 16, 2015

“Save the Human Race” by Christine PotterPosted by

Christine Potter

SAVE THE HUMAN RACE

Although she never did before, my mother lies.
She doesn’t have dementia. She answers questions

like someone drinking white wine at a dinner party,
pretending to have read the best-seller: Of course

I went to church! There was a skirt, she says, and
a dress—the same pattern? Red. I wore one of those.

The one we tried on Friday? I ask. A silence.
She takes a breath, relieved: Yes! The secret she

doesn’t have is safe. My father has been counseled
not to argue with her, or has his hearing aid off.

I think he’s going to say North Korea is planning
to nuke Hawaii, where my sister is on vacation, but

he’s into economic inequality and arthritis instead.
At least I don’t have to explain why I believe this is not

the worst time civilization has ever known, remind
him to take his pain-killers, cite the Civil War or

the Black Death. He’s in a good mood. He tells me
about the diversionary mission he never flew with

his Air Force unit, the medical discharge just in time.
I feign surprise; he’s shared this secret with my sister,

not me. So now we both know, I type into the email.
Dad wouldn’t have been one of the few survivors.

I think about not being anything at all, a missed beat,
a bright white screen with nothing on it. I hit send.

Outside, little brown and grey birds peck at the feeder.
A young hawk, mumbling his hunger, misses them

and takes off. And a jet in the cloudless sky is a silver
brooch on a white ribbon, up so high I can’t even hear it.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Christine Potter: “About ten years ago, when my husband and I were making music in a high Episcopal church that was much into incense and bells, I sat in the choir loft and felt the connection between poetry and Scripture. It was a visceral thing, an awakening. In fairness, I may have been slightly oxygen-deprived at that moment (they were really into incense and bells there), but I still think of the two together. I believe in God and I believe in His presence here on earth in Jesus Christ. And I write poems. I think the spirit that makes poems happen is holy, even if the poetry is utterly profane. And even if you’re not choking on clouds of frankincense when you write it.”

Rattle Logo

February 13, 2015

“A Beautiful Town” by Haya PomrenzePosted by

Haya Pomrenze

A BEAUTIFUL TOWN

When my father died I was twelve hundred miles away
because a giggly-bosomed hospice nurse
in loud pink scrubs chirped
that it could be weeks, even a month.
That evening he had mushroom barley soup
then gave each child an I love you.
Over the phone it sounded like a regular I love you
not a final phrase, which is why
you have to see people when they speak to you.
I wish I could say that looking back
I heard my father’s wet cough, his rattled breath
a long pause, which forced me to board a plane.
Instead that night my father went to the bathroom
with his walker and his Jamaican aide he loved like a daughter,
which makes me feel happy and sad. His kidneys shut down
the way his face did when he was hurt or angry.
Back in the railed hospital bed he counted down in real time
the same way he did when we were late for carpool or synagogue.
Five minutes, four minutes, faltered at three.
He made it to one minute, eyes at half-mast.
It’s a beautiful town, he said.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

[download audio]

__________

Haya Pomrenze: “With the exception of eating rice pudding and chocolate babka, writing poetry is the closest I’ve come to a true spiritual experience. I’m a believer in God on my own terms. I write poems in synagogue, on carpool line, while having sex, working with my psych patients. I have absolute faith in a higher power when I write. There’s a bit of the divine in my mortal words.”

Rattle Logo

February 12, 2015

“What Is My Life About?” by Julie Price PinkertonPosted by

Julie Price Pinkerton

WHAT IS MY LIFE ABOUT?

This naked, lonely question
is still simmering in a crock pot
on the counter of a beach bungalow

where no one lives. But if you like,
I can show you some examples of what falls
out of my life when it’s whacked like a piñata:

My friend Emily reminisces about the cat
she used to have, and still misses.
“Clearly, Pippin and I were telepathic.”

In my collection of very bad Christmas decorations
there is a cloisonné manger scene with a baby Jesus
who has a snout like a piglet.

I have been criticized for always looking downward
when I walk. But in only five decades I have found enough
coins to sink a rowboat.

If I were a household object I would insist
on being a gooseneck lamp or the yarn mane
of a toy horse.

Most of my prayers are like drive-by shootings.
Please help me. Please save her. Thank you
for the parking spot.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Julie Price Pinkerton: “I am a poet of faith. I’ve never written that sentence before. I was raised in a Baptist church on a gravel road on the outskirts of Brazil, Indiana. All of Brazil, Indiana, is kind of an outskirt. The church of my childhood was weird and toxic. Long story. At the center of it: Our pastor’s son (who became a pastor himself) was a pedophile. Nobody knew this until many years later, but something was off there, and I could tell. I hated going there. I stuck with my faith, though. Went to a really small Methodist college, the University of Evansville. A battering ram hit my faith in God when I was a freshman and our school’s entire basketball team was killed in a plane crash. Among the lost was the boy I had just started dating. But faith was still there, flailing. Post-college adult stuff. Marriage, divorce, the switching of churches, the switching of denominations (within Christianity), jobs, cities, marriage again, and hobbling along with my belief in God, which never leaves, but baffles me repeatedly like a train I can hear blaring somewhere in the woods but I cannot find the tracks. I’m 54 now. And Christ is still the only thing that makes sense to me. My atheist friends find this quaint. That’s OK.”

Rattle Logo

February 11, 2015

“Saved” by Kate PeperPosted by

Kate Peper

SAVED

My husband and I have Space Bagged our genitalia—
dried kelp bulbs and cowrie shells—
and hung them in the spare bedroom closet.
At Christmas, I nudge them aside
to get to the egg carton of tiny glass:
an angel, lamb, stars.

Cleaning the junk drawer
I tell him, There’s a Swedish woman
who’s working on breaking
the human body down into plant food.
Honey, that’s what I want
when I die.

As a Jew, he replies, I believe
our bodies must not be defiled,
and writes Buy Burial Plots on the whiteboard.
Well, I say, dumping out old Tupperware,
as a Christian, we’re already dust.
God will remold me after I die.

We climb the stairs to our bedroom
and pull the eiderdown to our chins.
There are no crashing waves here.
The tide has receded, just dusting
our lips with salt.
Slowly, his hand smoothes my hair.
This is what we have, really:
there’s nothing to be saved.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Kate Peper: “Though I was raised Lutheran, I didn’t jump into Christianity until a few years ago. My faith is growing daily in small but significant increments: Every time I pray and ask for help—even if it’s to write a poem—I receive God’s grace and am blessed with humility and strength, which in turn strengthens my faith. In the past four years I’ve seen how my painting and poetry have been quietly inspired by this new sense of looking at the world.” (web)

Rattle Logo

February 10, 2015

“Water Under World” by Hannah Faith NotessPosted by

Hannah Faith Notess

WATER UNDER WORLD

That river had me marked
as soon as I drifted underground.

I palmed the coins from my eyes
and leapt from the raft into dark water

as cat-eyed goddesses watched me,
whirring their displeasure. From fog

a young god emerged and gathered me
against his body, dripping, onto the bank.

Of course I worshipped him. Of course
I should begin again. Eighth grade:

I wanted a shirtless lifeguard
at the waterpark to see me, so I leapt

from the flotilla of plastic innertubes
into the waist-deep canal, where spotlit

mummies craned animatronic necks.
He came. He rustled, furious,

from a plastic hedge and banned
me from the Lost River

of the Pharaohs for life. No Nile.
No Underworld. Cast out,

sunburned, that night I drifted,
thought of diving, as the waves kept

rocking me, like hands
on my shoulders. Now I could die

because a boy had held me and
his anger made him warm.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

[download audio]

__________

Hannah Faith Notess: “I’m a post-evangelical Christian who landed in the peace church (Mennonite) tradition. I take pleasure in the intersection of religious language and regular language on the page. If faith is ‘the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1), then being a person of faith means I’m always trying to figure out what it means to live in two worlds—this world and some unseen world, whatever it looks like. For instance, a cheesy waterpark ride could become a gateway to the underworld.” (website)

Rattle Logo

February 9, 2015

“Love Poem” by Dan NemesPosted by

Dan Nemes

LOVE POEM

In this episode a terrorist cell will spread
a biological agent through the water supply
unless we can stop them. In this episode
you wear your hair down. You wear all black
leather. You carry an assault rifle very tenderly,
cradled in the crook of your arm. In this episode
we parachute from 100,000 feet. We fall
for an entire commercial break. We have good
aim and endless 5.56×45 mm cartridges.
Even though the terrorists wear masks, to us
it’s clear that they’re all variations on my mother:
trigger-­happy and erratic, surprised by our intel.
And just before the rogue scientists synthesize
the virus, we burst into the secret lab. You cradle
your rifle like a rifle. You have a beautiful
tappet. No one sees what’s coming next, a twist:
the smoke clears, a hyperbolic needle buried
in my neck. The plunger looks very plastic,
like the stock of your rifle. The audience can’t
believe it. I die in this episode. No, they sob,
as the virus eats my eyeballs. Run, they scream,
as you sprint away from the explosions. What
will she do now? they wonder, as you chopper
away, as the credits flash and pop on their screens.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Dan Nemes: “When I was an undergraduate, I spent a semester in El Salvador. This was 2005. I read Carolyn Forché’s ‘The Colonel’ as my bus climbed a mountainside about an hour outside of the capital, San Salvador. My faith took me to El Salvador, the witness, really of the people and the Jesuit priests and North American nuns and Archbishop Oscar Romero, those who were killed because their faith said God starves when a child goes hungry, because God’s skull bursts when a union organizer is executed in the street. I’ve never been able to write a poem about my time in El Salvador as poignant as Forché’s, so I do my best with what I can get my arms around. Now, living in Nashville, my apartment is about three miles from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the site of Tennessee’s Death Row. As part of a Benedictine spirituality group, every Saturday I go and pray the psalms with men incarcerated there. After we recite those ancient poems, we often swap our own or our favorites written by others. The act of writing poems cracks me open. Being faithful, being a poet of faith, means, for me, trusting in the slow and painful, rapturous and joyous accumulation of life, knowing that bearing witness to the suffering and joy in myself, in others, and in creation is redemptive.”

Rattle Logo

February 6, 2015

“Desert Cell” by Steve MyersPosted by

Steve Myers

DESERT CELL

Three days we’d driven the southwest desert up and down
but hadn’t seen one roadrunner till this afternoon,

on Corona Drive behind the Walmart, skittering
under a Chevy that was up on blocks, half-hopping,

half-fluttering onto an adobe wall, less bird
than shabby scrap of one, which we took to be a sign

we were finally onto something way more genuine
than Taos, or uptown Sedona, as spiritual as

Hollywood Boulevard or Atlantic City, shop
after shop of Kokopelli and the same brown tees.

Tonight, the roadhouse, and the famous cheeseburger—
6.95, a buck extra for your slather

of green chili, another .50 for your square
of American. When a waitress vacuum-packed in black

showed up, I asked her for something local, an IPA,
and she suggested a Marble, “the Rock Solid Beer,”

then wondered if I’d take a Red instead, if they’d
run out of the other. You couldn’t keep your eyes from

wandering: The King, radiant in black velvet and hung
as he was in his younger days; a simmering

Marilyn above the nippled, red leatherette
upholstery. Fires near Bowie, Arizona, were threatening

a three-year experiment in silent meditation
by Buddhists there, trying to bring world peace through prayer,

according to a reporter on the TV screen—
the holy homing moth-to-flame again; Their cells,

wrote Merton of the Desert Fathers, were the furnace
of Babylon in which … they found themselves with Christ,

and just then you could understand: when the waitress returned
with a burger oozing juices over a flawless bun,

a mountain of skin-on fries and a couple longnecks,
one “on the house,” you could practically hear the Sweet

Inspirations singing There’ll Be Peace in the Valley
For Me, O Lord; it was like you’d died and gone to

Santa Fe, where the brewery’s upscale tap room
looks on the Cathedral Basilica de San Francisco

to the east, north on the still snow-stippled peaks
of the Sangre de Cristo.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Steve Myers: “My father, a natural storyteller, taught me to read. He also was supervisor of the Methodist Church Sunday School in our town. Since I was a child, I’ve moved between these two worlds, literary and spiritual, exploring at various points of intersection. Went to college a religion major, emerged an English major. Headed for grad school in English, abruptly swerved and completed a Master of Divinity degree, was ordained, then earned the PhD in English. Along the way moved to Presbyterianism, then Anglicanism. Have taught literature for 25 years at a Roman Catholic university. I’d summarize my poetic preoccupations as ‘language, landscape, and the idea of God,’ if the extraordinary Charles Wright hadn’t already beat me to it.”

Rattle Logo