Category Archives: God

For Charles on his…

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25th birthday

I go to

The-cards-for-pariahs section

Away from all the other

Greeting card confections it is

lightly and surreptitiously attended, although I myself come here often

Oddly situated on a half-aisle between

plumbing and luggage

The cards here are all in shades of ocre

Sometimes the clip art is unbearable, smudged, or just incomprehensible scribbles…macaroni mosaics where all the pasta is long-gone,

All’s that’s left: glue ghosts,

No words left to signify anything but metaphysically inky

Noon-to-3

Darkness

The Stone Lions

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I go to the stone lions, lean my head against their solid, immovable weight. I tell them the things one might tell a friend–stretches of fatigue and loneliness, grim sorties in search of solace in strange and blasted places, words for anger, stones for real

Children who cry out

Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes

In the name of the Lord!

-Luke 19:40

The Stages of Grief

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The call costs five cents a minute and you have to be ready with a form of payment. On the other end of the line there is

A princess stuck in a well

Bears curled in around a wee-sleepy home invader

A girl in a badly blended family with a knack for the most inconvenient footwear

And all the rest of us-

sleeping beauties, garden-of-Gethsemane-tired

Of hearing about

This impending crucifixion.

The Bear in the Woods

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The day that Miracle died we walked in the mountains. Two bears walked ahead of us and their presence seemed ordained, magical.

It was magical I tell myself even though she died.

Sometimes I feel like I am out of mantras, out of coins for the machine, no longer capable of telling myself to believe it will all be ok.

Then Casey Hathaway tells us all about the bear who kept him company in the woods we have all got lost in and

I go there to find Him too, lean into his ursine chest, sob a little.

Believe He is real, despite the feat in our eyes.