HOLY TEXT, BY Audra Puchalski |
I bury the very on-fire stub of myrrh in the dirt, tombstone it with a striped rock burning hot from the pandemic summer sun. I delicately pollute the air, contaminate the earth. My love has always had its perforated rubric—tear here to detach the piece of ego that keeps me quiet. What is essential: flower plus bowl of water. Random tomato. Proverbial white-pelted hart, unhuntable. Who needs sentences anymore, in this economy? Just write poems. I remember the pews with their padded kneelers hinged underneath, remember waiting for everyone to un-kneel to flip it back up, remember being the last one to un-kneel because unlistening. Now I’m planting fire under the last few shards of mulch, under the apricots the tree drops like very slow bombs, exploding sugar, drawing flies who come to eat their juices from the soil where they were spilled. But I’m fine. The train whistles meaninglessly. This is what I’m doing now. Crabapple, meyer lemon, apricot, borage, tomato where no tomato was sown, but a tomato saw fit to grow there, beside the garden hose, and so I stake it, so await whatever unsought harvest it bestows. |
Audra Puchalski lives in Oakland, California and is the author of the chapbook Queer Hagiographies. Her work has been published in Bat City Review, Juked, Superstition Review, Cutbank Online, and others. Find her at audrapuchalski.com.