I.
I fold myself into a junk drawer
in the clerk’s office. It’s full of rubber bands
and buttons, screws and scraps of paper,
dead batteries and mystery keys, and me.
I press myself between pages of the hymnal
like a dried flower or a program from last November.
I hide in the inverted dome lights.
No one looks up except to see heaven,
and I look nothing like God so no one sees.
I’m locked in the custodial supply closet,
tangled in a fold of the stage curtains,
shut up into the nursery’s toy cabinets.
No one has ever seen me; no one ever will.
II.
Like a cow, I was born to die.
Or rather, they tell me, like firewood, I was born
to burn, to become something other:
heat sinking through flesh to warm blood,
smoke curling blue through air.
I wish we had incense to mask the char,
but this room smells of stale bread,
that one of chlorine, and all these of fruit snacks
and diapers. Sometimes I am both
the cow and the fire, strangely yoked.
My fat drips, my heat licks,
and the congregation feasts
but not before praying over me one last time.
Is it sacrilege to claim that I, too, am eaten alive
every Sunday only to dredge myself back to life?
III.
From another church, you smile behind stained glass,
and I love you from across the street.
You are the smell of a crackling leather bible
that has a different typeface, a different title.
You are the feeling of warm baptismal water
on my fingertips, the perfect temperature for infants.
You are the sound of 200 bodies worshiping silently:
look here, their knees on kneelers as they pray.
Mold your tongue into a velvet-bottomed collection plate,
a foreign concept to me, so used to carbon paper
slipped into crisp white envelopes jingling with coins.
Swallow down my nickels, hot
from a July minivan. On the back of this quarter
is a Georgia peach. On that one, a lighthouse
in Maine. Let’s go there. Strike Utah
off the map along with New York,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri.
If there are wagon ruts preserved in a field,
if there are memories of massacres
or burned printing presses, let’s leave them
to their graveyards, their ash mounds. Let’s blaze
a trail by slipping unseen through the fires
already lit for us. Let’s find a freshwater lake,
a forest, a place untouched by desert or deseret,
a place forsaken by honeybees, infested
with yellow jackets. Let’s whisper
to each other: “This is the place.”
Kelly Burdick studied English and creative writing at BYU before absconding with their degree to become a librarian in a tiny town in the inland northwest. They have been published in Segullah, Inscape, Eclectica, and others; and they are one of the coeditors for COOP: chickens of our poetry. You can find more of their work at kellyerin.com.
