Jolene’s Reviews > Pilgrim Bell: Poems > Status Update

At the center of a heart
is data, the same
idiot degradation that turned the stars
into us.

From "Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats"

Plus, my sins
were practically devotional:
two peaches stolen from
a bodega, so sweet I savored
even what I lost from
my teeth. I know it's no excuse,
but even now I'm drooling.
...
Allow
me these treasures, Lord.
Time will break what doesn't
bend -- even time. Even you.

the heart is a muscle as stupid
as hamstring or a miniature
iris with its ridiculous blossoms
blooming only through ice

bright dust
pillowed floor
we see prayers
as we say them

They say it's not
faith if you can hold it in your hands
but I suspect the opposite may be true,
that real faith passes first through the body
like an arrow. Consider our whole galaxy
staked in place by a single star. I fear
we haven't said nearly enough about that.

They were put with me fully built, passionless as shoelaces, pitying even my name. To their credit, they weren't given what I have: majesty and the heft of a face. They want mouths like mine that can blow out tiny fires. The mercy of speech. Of sleep. Of they.

It is pretty to be sweet
and full of pardon like
a flower perfuming the
hands that shred it, but
all piety leads to a single
point: the same paradise
where dead lab rats go.

Behold the poet, God's
incarnate spit in the mud,
chirping like lice in a fire.
Songs to stir the arousable horn.
Songs to make money
which he treats like food:
fit as much as you can
in your mouth, never shit.

His most intoxicating delusion --
that evil might be soluble in art.

I sat fingering my gilded frame, counting
grievances like toes:

here my mother, here my ring,
here my sex, and here my king.

All still there. Wrath is the desire
to repay what you've suffered.

Kneeling on coins
before the minor deity in the mirror.
Clueless as a pearl.

That the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering
but to experience it seems -- can I say this? --
a waste?

Bravery pitches its refugee tent

at the base of my brain and slowly starves, chipping into
darkness like a clay bird bouncing down a well. All night
I eat garlic cream, water my dead orchids.

In what world does any of it seem credible?
God's word is a melody, and melody requires repetition.
God's word is a melody I sang once then forgot.

The difference between.
A real voice and the other kind.
The way its air vibrates.
Through you. The way air.
Vibrates. The violence.
In your middle ear.