j o h n d f r y

we lifted our eyes to the hills how we’d lifted burnt offerings, our hearts. as shorn things bleat, cling. for help had not come. for our bramble-bloodied feet slipped—He slept—shadowed by the absence of outstretched, His hand. could stave neither solar flares nor the oxidized green of moonglare watching over us, insomniac. we knew not why the slow subtraction (devil’s arithmetic) of our right wrist bones clamored, cold. as if pursued not by what, but whom were heavy-laden we looking for, Lord, where smoke risen from a ram’s scapula was its lampblack psalm, to the hills we lifted our eyes, tattered antiphons. thrumming our throats threadbare, sang deserts away from where we were promised benediction. our goodbyes blackened, our altars. for help had not come.

theotokos
	You the cradle this world-light crawled from —His caul, His crown before thorns kissed His cry split stable-sanctified air— distinct, the smell of rust, amniotic grit of afterbirth: piss & shit Augustine says we’re all born between & as He swam, so swam I omphalos (spirit of the river hurry me) unnamed, unheard before my mother’s shudder spoke
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diptych (his hairshirt)
	but what does a god lack? overheard in the ex voto church-dark: cassock’s tatter unpolished chapel quiet, Our Lady of the ashes long-unvisited & a brink of dream dimly remembered ragged, its never-mended hem: or, a passage chosen by dowsing rod, the illuminated page opened impromptu, prophesying we shall not all sleep wilderness a god lacks only lack voices cry out but we shall all be changed gargoyle choir chanting to the swallow congregation —truesilver sometimes lies— no monsters here but a candlelit monstrance only a heretic adores & the most blessed sacrament no more than memory’s aftertaste of reliquary bones in which restless revenants linger like autumn leaves swept from the narthex, unshriven
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JOHN D FRY is the author the chapbook silt will swirl (NewBorder) and a recent graduate of the Texas State University-San Marcos MFA program. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offending Adam, Free Verse, Pebble Lake Review, This Spectral Evidence, and Konundrum Engine Literary Review, among others. He edits poetry for Newfound, book reviews for Front Porch, and lives in the Texas Hill Country.

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