by KT Herr
it got so He was popping in so often
I had half an eye out scanning every skin for His
particular silent hum a kind of neon purple murmur
flaring up around a person’s edges I’d leave
the door ajar while sweeping out the nave or crack
the larder window one afternoon the Holy Spirit
flew into the bell tower as a bird how parenthetical
Its wings how merry I felt watching the friars
chase It out with sticks
my Christ is a pestled clove
a cleavered horizon bit blue with rippling cold
His foreskin burning my bridal finger His rapt regard
a precipice of ice
when I fell into the fire
I was dreaming of it a long slick satin sheet
I lay across like a marriage bed thinking: if it cracks
and I fall in I was born to die once
if it stays
whole I was born to die again and again
::
KT Herr (they/she) is a queer writer, stepparent, and curious person with recent work appearing in Foglifter, The Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and as winner of the 2023 American Literary Review Award in Poetry, among others. KT is a Four Way Books board member and an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow in Critical Poetics at the University of Houston.
ID: Giovanni di Paolo, “The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena.” (Italian, Siena 1398–1482 Siena), Tempera and gold on wood. In the public domain.
Psaltery & Lyre 