Two Poems

Emily Stoddard

An attempt to convey how uncomfortable the word “kingdom” makes me

My messiah hung on the cross for three weeks, and when his blood emptied, they slaughtered calves to replenish the effort. My messiah has a body I can taste, and it tastes like a stamp from an exotic island. My angels have a sun devoted to their backlighting, and my devils speak only in spiked tongues. My virgin mother completed her own hysterectomy so that none again would possess her. We enshrined her uterus and bring it out once a year to a crowd of bewildered silence. Our pope wears one of her fallopian tubes around his little finger but only touches it when asking us to trust him. My mass is twice as long as the church on the next block, my knees are buckled in by a muscle stronger than my tongue. I once prayed the rosary for thirty-six hours with the awe and fear of meeting God, and afterward, roses bloomed under my fingernails. My children have been baptized twice, first for the original sin, second for protection against future guilt. My gospel has more bread, my Friday more fish, and my Bingo has two extra free spaces. We drink blood at the altar before noon and beer at the hall after. My Ave Maria is always dressed for the occasion, and the occasion is always grief. And my Latin—my Latin sings like a lamb, and the lamb is round and parable-innocent and forever crying out: domus, domus, domus.

& a red secret blooms

the white of the esophagus, unexpected
when my father cuts the fur on the edge of the field

how much like an umbilical cord, the tracts
that tie an animal into itself

how the white matches her soft underbelly
touched minutes ago in the underbrush,

next to the tree where she abandoned her legs,
after the unexpected thrashing

her eyes not gone away to glassy yet, warmth
still caught in her side when I press my hand and whisper

something like gratitude, something like surprise
how soft a body when death is new

© Emily Stoddard

=====

Emily Stoddard‘s writing has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Rust + Moth, New Poetry from the Midwest, Menacing Hedge, Hermeneutic Chaos, Gravel, and elsewhere. She is an affiliate of the Amherst Writers & Artists Method and leads writing workshops online and in Michigan. More at emilystoddard.com.