brancheslitmag

[brancheslitmag]

A Child Said, What is the Grass?

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full

          hands;

How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it

          is any more than he.

  I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful

          green stuff woven.

  Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we

          may see and remark, and say Whose?

  Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe

          of the vegetation.

  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow

          zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the

same, I receive them the same.

  And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

  Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;

It may be you are from old people and from women, and

          from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,

And here you are the mother's laps.

  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old

          mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

  O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths

          for nothing.

  I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men

          and women,

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring

          taken soon out of their laps.

  What do you think has become of the young and old men?

What do you think has become of the women and

          children?

  They are alive and well somewhere;

The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait

          at the end to arrest it,

And ceased the moment life appeared.

  All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and

          luckier.

--WALT WHITMAN

Whitman also uses repetition to give his images power. He uses grass to 

establish commonality among humans who really all live and die and 

prepare the way for others in their short lives. Whitman captures the 

immortality of our legacies beautifully (the smallest sprouts show there...)" 

and does a really spectacular job in finding beauty in the mundane and 

hope in what first appears bleak.

[brancheslitmag]

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,  Out of black bean and wet slate bread,  Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,  Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,  They Lion grow.  Out of the gray hills  Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,  West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,  Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,  Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,  They Lion grow.  Earth is eating trees, fence posts,  Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,  "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,  From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,  From the furred ear and the full jowl come  The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose  They Lion grow.  From the sweet glues of the trotters  Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower  Of the hams the thorax of caves,  From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"  Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,  The grained arm that pulls the hands,  They Lion grow.  From my five arms and all my hands,  From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,  From my car passing under the stars,  They Lion, from my children inherit,  From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,  From they sack and they belly opened  And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth  They feed they Lion and he comes. 

--PHILIP LEVINE

Levine uses Bible/Torah-like repetition with devastating power to create an anti-God feeding off an apocolyptic wasteland of man-made destruction. The repetition and lingo ("they feed they lion") of Detroit blue collar workers gives the poem a horrible, menacing feeling that serves as a warning of what happens if we ignore nature and our morals and dehumanize people.

[brancheslitmag]

Down Exit Ramp 69 in Eatonville, Mississippi

Some believe that birds are signs of birth and death, especially when a bird taps on a window or flies into a home. But what does it mean if you drive off an exit ramp through a thicket of trees and you live but you have killed an entire clan of birds, their lights smashed out on the hood of your car?

*

On a riverbank of parasites, toxic-waste brim and discolored condoms, Ken says, That was my first blowjob from a guy. 

Sure. And ham hangs from the windows of my home I don't own, curing.

While I'm driving home, he reads from a book as big as his lap, I am He that Aches with Love. 

I'm caught in a difference voice, Clear and sweet is all that is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul, my hands in Whitman's pants, lying with him on a beach, mapping his back with a blade of grass between cigarette-stained teeth before giving him a rim job.

*

We have a blow out, speeding off an exit ramp through trees full of nests, the grill grating the hill like a wedge of cheese. The windows down, the sunroof open: leaves, grass and dirt fill the car.

Hallelujah to my downshifting, to something other than myself steering us without consequence.

--STEVE BAILEY 

This poem really captures the euphoria of being yourself (like coming out) without worrying overmuch about consequences and trusting that somehow or other things will work out. The "downshifting" line is really powerful and captures the difficulty but also satisfaction of trusting that things will turn out all right.

[brancheslitmag]

Fight or Flight

Do you smell smoke? The passengers all flinch the instant someone says the words. Suppose there's fire, the Godforsaken think. Lord knows it's rude to ask for favors in a pinch. Still, it's best to hedge your bets, crawl every inch you can to sidestep heavenly repose. They finger beads of sweat, swearing tardy oaths- that they'll forsake all seven deadly sins. Six miles above their own recumbent lives the flight attendants pin their hopes on God's lapel. He's earned his wings-they've had good luck thus far. But then again, he's had his drives, his routs. Plagues and pestilence, droughts and floods. What makes them think he gives a flying fuck?

--NANCY CAROL MOODY 

This poem considers how people who have no control of their fate cope by hoping in desperation that God will help them even if they don't believe in him, and that strange mindset of believing he should listen to them when he doesn't listen to others who are just as or more deserving. 

[brancheslitmag]

Here I Am, Lord

The ribbed black of the umbrella   

is an argument for the existence of God,   

that little shelter   

we carry with us   

and may forget   

beside a chair   

in a committee meeting   

we did not especially want to attend.   

What a beautiful word, umbrella.   

A shade to be opened.   

Like a bat’s wing, scalloped.   

It shivers.   

A drum head   

beaten by the silver sticks   

of rain   

and I do not have mine   

and so the rain showers me.

--MICHAEL CHITWOOD

There is an old tale of an old man trapped in his house during a flood. A truck comes to rescue him, a boat comes to rescue him, a helicopter comes to rescue him. Each time he refuses, claiming that God will save him. Finally, the waters overpower him and he dies. When he gets to heaven, he asks God why he didn't save him. God responds, saying, "I sent you a truck and a boat and a helicopter. What do you want from me if you didn't take it?" This poem reminds us to find God in the little places and not wait for the big miracles.

[brancheslitmag]

The Way We Were Made

But you made every

delicate, elegant wrist

& glistening ankle.

But you made them

beautiful

in braided rope

& dime store gold.

But you made every

necklace clasp.

But you made them

caress the nape

like an errant wind

after a shower.

But you made every

eyelash erotic. Every

single strand of hair

soft.

But you made them

from dust & bone.

Made every glorious

singing thigh. Every

button nose.

But you made them

with holes—

wide open

to the faintest hints

of salt

in a sea breeze, salt

in the sweaty mouth

of a navel, salt

in the blood, sweet

in every wrong way.

--MARCUS WICKER

There are many different views of God: the all powerful, all knowing; the one that lives in animals; one God in multiple bodies; the male or the female; and many, many more. This poem presents an all together different God, one that is appreciated in the little moments of life. Wicker reminds us that there is no one correct idea of who or what God is.

[brancheslitmag]

I Wasn't One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open

    I

My life is the gardener of my body. The brain—a hothouse closed tight

with its flowers and plants, alien and odd

in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct.

The face—a formal French garden of symmetrical contours

and circular paths of marble with statues and places to rest,

places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself

in a green maze, and Keep Off and Don’t Pick the Flowers.

The upper body above the navel—an English park

pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike,

humanlike, in our image, after our likeness,

its arms linking up with the big night all around.

And my lower body, beneath the navel—sometimes a nature preserve,

wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve,

and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of

forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth

polished stones with dark vegetation between them,

precise paths fraught with meaning

and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father

and the commandments of my mother

are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love

is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play

are my children. And the life my life.

     2

I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been

and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years,

but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time

is my own. The sand on the seashore—those infinite grains

are the same sand where I made love in Achziv and Caesarea.

The years of my life I have broken into hours, and the hours into minutes

and seconds and fractions of seconds. These, only these,

are the stars above me

that cannot be numbered.

     3

And what is my life span? I’m like a man gone out of Egypt:

the Red Sea parts, I cross on dry land,

two walls of water, on my right hand and on my left.

Pharaoh’s army and his horsemen behind me. Before me the desert,

perhaps the Promised Land, too. That is my life span.

     4

Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open

in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed

within us. And when we die, everything is open again.

Open closed open. That’s all we are.

    5

What then is my life span? Like shooting a self-portrait.

I set up the camera a few feet away on something stable

(the one thing that’s stable in this world),

I decide on a good place to stand, near a tree,

run back to the camera, press the timer,

run back again to that place near the tree,

and I hear the ticking of time, the whirring

like a distant prayer, the click of the shutter like an execution.

That is my life span. God develops the picture

in His big darkroom. And here is the picture:

white hair on my head, eyes tired and heavy,

eyebrows black, like the charred lintels

above the windows in a house that burned down.

My life span is over.

     6

I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah,

I wasn’t even among the survivors.

And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt.

I came to the Promised Land by sea.

No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke

within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me

by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search

for emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness

of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope,

I still have within me the lust to search for living water

with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows.

Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers.

Jewish history and world history

grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes

to a powder. And the solar year and the lunar year

get ahead of each other or fall behind,

leaping, they set my life in perpetual motion.

Sometimes I fall into the gap between them to hide,

or to sink all the way down.

    7

I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment

millions of human beings are standing at crossroads

and intersections, in jungles and deserts,

showing each other where to turn, what the right way is,

which direction. They explain exactly where to go,

what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop

and ask again. There, over there. The second

turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right,

near the white house, by the oak tree.

They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand

and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there,

as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion.

I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment.

--YEHUDA AMICHAI

Amichai uses religious themes and biblical format to really  capture how people attempt to organize and define their own lives, which are truly too multifaceted and out of our control to approach understanding much less manipulate them. Great use of private parts to drive home that our body and mind (and the world) play by their own rules.

[brancheslitmag]

God Permit Industrious Angels

God permit industrious angels Afternoons to play. I met one, -- forgot my school-mates, All, for him, straightaway. God calls home the angels promptly At the setting sun; I missed mine. How dreary marbles, After playing the Crown!

--EMILY DICKINSON

I absolutely love the ambiguity of this poem- the "industrious angels" could represent forces doing good in one's life in leaving, but also people you pin your hopes on who ultimately disappoint you in the end (perhaps because they are humans, not angels) and make you uneasy with a life you were previously satisfied with. This has so many possible allusions- relationships, good fortune, a mood, actual angels to name a few, and its amazing how the poem can fit so many explanations so perfectly.

[brancheslitmag]

God, Dead

Who knows what the world is?  I charged

my Nietzsche textbook at the bookstore,

hoping that some grandeur after the death of God

would flame out shining from the pages,

but I was shaken, crushed like foil, the shopboy

scowled at me, damn him and his nose ring,

the cumulonimbus clouds gathered greatness,

dark, like the ooze of oil, and I ran among crushed men

reckoning how far to my car as the fat drops

fell like rods, generating splashes as I trod,

and all the neons seared my eyes, trading words with me,

Vacancy, Tattoos, Hot Croissants, as through the bleared

smeared window of the French Bakery the female baker

toiled wearing a man's smudged shirt and shared

with this man the smells if not the flesh, if not the soil

or soul, no bare foot feel of being in the shoddy world,

no croissant for me.

  Nature is somewhere, spent but there, and still,

one guesses, living, since that's what nature does,

living with the dear freshness of deep things,

but I lived then in Los Angeles, and, home,

looking out the window as the last lights

blackened to the West, I went traveling towards morning,

riding my soggy bed, until from the brown smoggy brink

of the world eastward came springing what

we have instead of the Holy Ghost, bent sunlight

over the world brooding, warm, comforting

as breasts, flying on one bright wing.

--TONY BARNSTONE

God, Dead by Tony Barnstone is a sprawling stream of consciousness that uses God as a lens to describe attempting to find satisfaction in artificial stimulation like cities that we can only find in the nature we disregard and in fact destroy with our disregard. It really captures the spirit of a city with it's vivid montage of flashing images like tattoos, croissants, that don't comfort like "bent sunlight over the world brooding. (nice use of oo to create awe here)"

[brancheslitmag]

Nothing Says Get To Know You Like Ethics

Close your eyes and imagine. You’re at school. Remember school? You’ve been struggling through Math class all semester and now it’s the midterm. You studied last night ‘til you passed out from whiskey. Friday night is the big party. Your mom wants you to go to Notre Dame like her friend did. Your locker is full of love letters from the assistant principal. You sit down with the test, get through the first two problems alright — then you hit a stumper. In front of you sits your best friend, Tina, who you’re pretty sure has an eating disorder so you can see over her bony shoulders fine, but she’s not such a hot student herself. Three of your MySpace boyfriends are doing hard time and you haven’t brought yourself to write. Each time you try to focus on the stumper, you think of the pitiful cries of the man you drugged and locked in your bathroom. He’s losing weight and misses his family terribly. He tried to escape and you had to cut him. You used to be such a nice girl, and now here you are, knocked up, addicted to paint thinner, and about to cheat on a math test.

I know I’m supposed to come up with a question, but I’m so angry with you, I couldn’t possibly.

---

Complaint

Every time I love someone, you set them free.

---

Pattern I Noticed

At a belief club meeting, a newcomer asks a question so elemental that the members laugh, delighted, having forgotten it could be asked. The newcomer squirms and the members are quick to apologize. They applaud her marksmanship, her rigor. Then they secure a time for the next week’s meeting. They’re not trying to dodge the question. They think they’ve answered it.

--GABE DURHAM

This Durham poem doesn't talk directly about God, but what stood out to me the most is the final section, in which the belief club members are stunned by a newcomer asking an elemental question. Durham reminds us that these most basic questions should continually be asked and questioned.

[brancheslitmag]

Healthy Start

Every night, after she had finally left him, he’d fall asleep in a different spot: on the sofa, in an armchair in the living room, on the mat on the balcony like some homeless bum. Every morning, he made a point of going out for breakfast. Even prisoners get a daily walk in the yard, don’t they? At the café they always gave him a table set for two, and sat him across from an empty chair. Always. Even when the waiter specifically asked him whether he was alone. Other people would be sitting there in twos or threes, laughing or tasting each other’s food, or fighting over the bill, while Avichai sat by himself eating his Healthy Start—orange juice, muesli with honey, decaf double espresso with warm low-fat milk on the side. Of course it would have been nicer if someone had sat down across from him and laughed with him, if there had been someone to argue with over the bill and he’d have to struggle, to hand the money to the waitress saying, “Don’t take it from him! Mickey, stop. Just stop! This one’s on me.” But he didn’t really have anyone to do that with, and breakfast alone was ten times better than staying home.

Avichai spent a lot of time watching the people at the other tables. He’d eavesdrop on conversations, read the sports supplement or inspect the ups and downs of the Israeli shares on Wall Street with an air of detached concern. Sometimes someone would come over and ask for a section of the paper he’d finished reading, and he would nod and try to smile. Once, when a sexy young mother with a baby in a stroller walked over to him, he even said to her, as he gave up the front page with the banner headline about a gang rape in the suburbs: “What a crazy world we’re bringing our children into.” He thought it sounded like the kind of statement that brings people closer together, pointing as it did to their common fate, but the sexy mom just glared at him with a half-angry stare and took the Healthy Living supplement too without asking.

Then one Thursday a fat, sweaty guy walked into the café and smiled at him. Avichai was surprised. The last person who’d given him a smile was Maayan, five months before she left him, and hers had been utterly sarcastic, whereas the fat guy’s smile was soft, almost apologetic. The fat guy gestured unmistakably that he’d like to sit down, and Avichai nodded back almost without stopping to think. The fat guy took a seat.

“Meir,” he said, “I’m really sorry I’m late. I know we said ten but I had a nightmare morning with the kid.”

It crossed Avichai’s mind that maybe he ought to tell the fat guy he wasn’t Meir, but he found himself checking his watch instead, and saying, “What’s ten minutes? Forget it.”

Then neither of them spoke for a second, and Avichai asked if the kid was okay. And the fat guy said she was, it was just that she’d started a new kindergarten, and every time he took her there she had a hard time letting him go.

“But never mind,” he stopped short. “You’ve got enough on your plate without my problems. Let’s get down to business.”

Avichai took a deep breath and waited.

“Look,” the fat guy said. “Five hundred is too high. Give it to me for four hundred. Know what? Four hundred and ten even and I’m good for six hundred pieces.”

“Four hundred and eighty,” Avichai said. “Four hundred and eighty. And that’s only if you’re good for a thousand.”

“You gotta understand,” the fat guy said. “The market’s in the shitter, what with the recession and all. Just last night on the news they showed people eating out of garbage pails. If you keep pushing, I’ll have to sell high. You’re pricing me right out of the market.”

“Don’t worry,” Avichai told him. “For every three people eating out of garbage pails, there’s someone driving a Mercedes.”

For some reason, this sentence made the fat guy laugh out loud. “They told me you were tough,” he muttered with a smile.

“I’m just like you,” Avichai protested. “Just trying to keep body and soul together.”

The fat guy wiped his sweaty palm on his shirt, then held it out. “Four hundred and sixty,” he said. “Four hundred and sixty and I take a thousand.” When he saw Avichai wasn’t reacting, he added: “Four hundred and sixty, a thousand pieces, and I owe you a favor. And you know better than anyone, Meir, that in our business favors are worth more than money.”

This last sentence was all Avichai needed to take the outstretched hand and shake it. For the first time in his life, someone owed him a favor. Someone who thought his name was Meir, but still. And when they’d finished eating, as they argued over who would pick up the tab, a warm feeling spread through Avichai’s stomach. He beat the fat guy to it by a tenth of a second and shoved the crumpled bill into the waitress’s hand.

From that day on it happened almost routinely. Avichai would take a seat, place his order, and keep a lookout for any new person who came into the café, and if that person started searching the tables with an expectant look, Avichai would quickly wave and invite him or her to take a seat.

“I don’t want to have to take you to court,” a bald guy with thick eyebrows told him.

“Me neither,” Avichai conceded. “It’s always better to settle things amicably.”

“Just remember I don’t do night shifts,” a silicone-lipped bleach blonde announced.

“Just who do you think you are? Do you really expect everyone else to do night shifts, except you?” Avichai grumbled back.

“Gabi asked me to tell you he’s sorry,” said a guy with rotting teeth and bad breath.

“If he’s really sorry,” Avichai countered, “tell him to come and tell me himself. No middlemen!”

“In your e-mail you sounded taller,” a skinny redhead complained.

“In your e-mail you sounded less picky,” he snapped.

And somehow everything worked out in the end. He and baldy settled, the silicone lips agreed to ask her sister to babysit so she could do one night shift a week, the bad breath promised Gabi would phone, and the redhead and Avishai agreed they weren’t quite right for each other. Sometimes they picked up the tab, sometimes he did. With the redhead, they went dutch. It was all so fascinating that if a whole morning went by when nobody took a seat across from him at the table, Avichai’s heart began to sink. Luckily, this didn’t happen too often.

Almost a month had gone by since the sweaty fat guy when a pockmarked man walked in. Despite the pocked face and the fact that he looked at least ten years older than Avichai, he was a good-looking guy with loads of charisma. The first thing he said as he sat down was: “I was sure you wouldn’t show.”

“But we agreed to meet,” Avichai answered.

“Yes,” said the pockmarked guy with a sad smile, “except that after the way I yelled at you on the phone, I was afraid you’d chicken out.”

“So here I am,” Avichai said, almost teasingly.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you on the phone,” the guy apologized. “Really, I just lost it. But I meant every word I said—you got that? Now I’m asking you to stop seeing her.”

“But I love her,” Avichai said in a stifled voice.

“Sometimes you can love something and you still have to give it up,” the pockmarked guy said. “Listen to someone a little older than you. Sometimes you have to give it up.”

“Sorry,” Avichai said, “but I can’t.”

“Yes you can,” the guy shot back. “You can and you will. There’s no other way. We both love her, but I happen to be her husband, and I’m not about to let you break up my family. Got that?”

Avichai shook his head. “You have no idea what my life has been like this past year,” he told the husband. “Hell. Not even hell, just one great big stale chunk of nothing. And when you’ve been living with nothing for so long and suddenly something turns up, you can’t just tell it to go away. You understand me, don’t you? I know you understand me.”

The husband bit his lower lip. “If you see her one more time,” he said, “I’ll kill you. I’m not kidding either. I’ll kill you.”

“So kill me.” Avichai shrugged. “You don’t scare me. We’re all going to die in the end.”

The husband bent across the table and socked Avichai in the jaw. It was the first time in his life that anyone had hit him so hard, and Avichai felt a hot wave of pain surge up somewhere in the middle of his face and spread in every direction. Seconds later, he found himself on the floor, with the husband standing over him.

“I’ll take her away from here,” the husband kept shouting, as he went on kicking Avichai in the stomach and ribs. “I’ll take her far away, to another country, and you won’t know where she is. You’ll never see her again, you got that, you rotten piece of shit?”

Two waiters jumped on the husband and managed somehow to pull him away from Avichai. One of them yelled to the barman to call the police. With his cheek still glued to the coolness of the floor, Avichai watched the husband run out of the café. One of the waiters bent over and asked him whether he was okay. Avichai tried to answer.

“Do you want me to call an ambulance?” the waiter asked. Avichai whispered that he didn’t. “Are you sure?” the waiter insisted. “Your lip is bleeding.”

Avichai nodded slowly and shut his eyes. He tried as hard as he could to imagine himself with that woman. The one he’d never see again. He tried, and for a moment he almost succeeded. His whole body ached. He felt alive.

--ETGAR KERET

Keret tends to write stories that stun the reader in its absurdity. In this story, he has his main character, Avicahai, playing God. And yet, at the end, Avichai is weak, is beaten by the jealous boyfriend of a lover that he's never met. In this, Keret shows a God that is human, that is falliable. This is a power re-positioning of our idea of God. 

[brancheslitmag]

Skin for Skin

Her parents were four hours up the Interstate celebrating her baby cousin’s bris in Albany, and the new boy from English class, who quoted Nietzsche to the impertinent Miss Meade, sat shirtless on the orange rec room couch. Breath laced with cooking sherry and Marlboros, he was irresistible. His pale, concave chest scored with angry red pimples spoke of punk rock and wild abandon; his lithe body, a knife ready to spring. They made out in the darkness, side one of Astral Weeks spinning on the turntable. He pressed closer and touched her cheek tenderly, the throbbing vein in her neck, the gently curved clavicle she broke in a fall from her first bicycle. He wasn’t a spastic mauler like the rest of the mediocrities at her high school, not a clueless virgin impersonating the porn stars the other boys watched on their parents’ VCRs.

She whispered his name, halting his progression.

His voice was entirely changed. “You want to do it?” He took his time flipping the hair from his eyes in a gesture meant to seem casual, and removed his wallet from his jeans’ pocket, lightly fingering the raised circular impression to assure her that he had come prepared.

She felt the cool bite of his necklace against her skin, the pendant swinging around back as her fingers blindly explored his body, and she imagined a tiny motorcycle or pistol, something fearless strung at the end of the chain. And now, as he reset the pendant to its proper position dangling at his solar plexus, she realized that the constriction in her throat was entirely in-voluntary, and that the delirious moments before its appearance marked the end of a lifelong dream. Even in the basement’s gloom she could see it clearly, iridescent, glowing dangerously between them, like something aflame.

“Take it off,” she said, reaching for the gold crucifix at his neck. It was heavy; the miniature corpse reproduced in minute detail weighed something like two thousand years in her trembling hands. “

Why? Are you Jewish?”

“My parents are.”

“That’s cool.” He laughed and dipped in for an-other kiss, but she wasn’t having it.

She told him to take it off or forget the whole thing. He hesitated, not sure she was serious, then fumbled with the crucifix before lifting it over his head with great difficulty, as if he were bearing the True Cross on his narrow shoulders, then tossed it across the floor.

“Now what are you going to take off?”

“I’m done,” she said.

He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.“What’s your problem?”

He told her he had come all this way by bus and she owed him something. She knew what happened to girls who went back on the unspoken contract that was made when they invited boys over with their parents out of town. She had always thought a cocktease was worse than a whore, and now she faced the sickening prospect that everyone in her school would know what she was.

She had been with non-Jewish boys before, one or two had even worn simple crosses, but nobody so bold as to parade a gory crucifix before her eyes. She had naturally turned away from being part of an unlucky, persecuted tribe. The way she saw it, there was no gain in membership, only grief. “I’m not Jewish,” she had told her parents hundreds of times. “I’m a secular humanist and I believe in self-determination.” She thought ritual circumcision was barbaric. But now, as he slid his hand around her waist, she wished that she were with her parents and aunts and uncles celebrating her eight-day-old cousin’s covenant with God and the Jewish people. That was where she belonged, not here in a darkened basement with a nasty, crude boy determined to have his way.

He stood naked before her, wearing only a pair of white gym socks that smelled like they hadn’t been washed in a very long time. “Your turn,” he said.

Now in the dim light she saw it clearly against his livid thigh and it shocked her more than the appearance of the crucifix, like the emergence of a sea monster from a bathtub.

“No. I can’t.” She had never seen anything like it before, but had heard somewhere that uncircumcised men were likely to give their partners greater pleasure. She could not believe that.

He didn't seem fazed by her reaction at all, as if no were simply a prelude.

“Come on. It’s getting late.” And then, “I can ruin you.”

She thought of all the combinations of what might happen if he shot his mouth off around school, and she determined that she would be better off doing it with him to avoid a public shaming.

There was just one small thing.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, climbing off the couch and heading for the stairs.

She returned a few minutes later with a sharp Japanese paring knife that her mother used for salads in the summer, a bag of cotton balls and a bottle of witch hazel. “Okay, I’ll do it,” she said. “But first you have to let me fix something.”

--JONATHAN PAPERNICK

This is a truly fantastic coming of age story. In the title story from his short story collection, Papernick shows the complexities of a teen's connection to religion. It is understandable, it is relatable and it's still funny and shocking. Papernick forces us to question: how deeply does our connection to religion really run?

[brancheslitmag]

God

I am God—

Without one friend,

Alone in my purity

World without end.

Below me young lovers

Tread the sweet ground—

But I am God—

I cannot come down.

Spring!

Life is love!

Love is life only!

Better to be human

Than God—and lonely.

--LANGSTON HUGHES

Hughes starts this poem with the line "I am God." To start the poem with such a presumptuous line is powerful and Hughes knocks it out of the park and creates a heartbreaking that makes God relatable to humans by adding a stunning emotion--loneliness.

[brancheslitmag]

Easter

is my season

of defeat.

Though all

is green

and death

is done,  

I feel alone.

As if the stone

rolled off

from the head

of the tomb

is lodged

in the doorframe

of my room,

and everyone

I’ve ever loved

lives happily

just past

my able reach.

And each time

Jesus rises

I’m reminded

of this marble

fact:

they are not

coming back.

--JILL ALEXANDER ESSBAUM

Essbaum portrays the way we view religion through the holidays we celebrate within them. Although Easter is a day to celebrate the beginning of spring and the resurrection--both symbols of new beginnings. And yet, Essbaum's narrator is caught up on death and those she's lost. Can we sometimes find a disconnect between the meanings we are meant to find and how we truly feel?

[brancheslitmag]

Not All There

I turned to speak to God,

About the world’s despair;

But to make bad matters worse,

I found God wasn’t there.

God turned to speak to me

(Don’t anybody laugh)

God found I wasn’t there—

At least not over half.

--ROBERT FROST

In Not All There, Frost portrays the disconnect that worshipers find sometimes in trying to talk to God. The narrator looks to God for answers, but cannot find God and so when God goes to talk to him (or her), God can no longer find the narrator, presumably because of a loss of belief.

[brancheslitmag]

I know that He exists

I know that He exists.

Somewhere ��� in silence –

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes.

’Tis an instant’s play –

’Tis a fond Ambush –

Just to make Bliss

Earn her own surprise!

But – should the play

Prove piercing earnest –

Should the glee – glaze –

In Death’s – stiff – stare –

Would not the fun

Look too expensive!

Would not the jest –

Have crawled too far!

--EMILY DICKINSON

In this poem, Dickinson, of course, discusses death. But in this case, she connects to God and reminds us that although we continually seek God out in life, God is also there in death.