Poem: Things Lost

What is lost can never be saved
Is what they told her while kneeling
On achy knees before a dusty alter
Listening to damnation sermons
When everything is seen as a sin
No choice except to be a sinner
Being a saint was never an option

Poem: Seven Days

For seven days and seven nights
I was bound as a slave
Chained by your arms
While you created my world
In your image

Poem: God’s Chosen Chattel

In the valleys and fields
Mountain homes and other
Far flung places
Away from the coasts
The urban areas where ideas
Are exchanged by the multitude
They gather in the enclaves
In little white churches
Praying to a god who left

Short Story: God of the Glen

Ryleigh found herself in a part of the woods she had never seen before.

She had been skipping along the creek chasing a bullfrog who was winning the race when she’d tripped on her untied shoelace. Brushing the dirt and leaves from her already scabbed knees, she noticed a hole about her size in brambles that formed a perimeter around the creek.

The frog long gone, and having gotten bored with the game anyways, she ducked through the portal and followed it into the woods.

As she moved deeper into the passage, it got progressively darker as the thorns weaved between each other, nearly blocking out the sun. She never got scared, or at least admitted it to herself, because she could see the light at the end of the tunnel ahead of her. Even though it was a constant beacon, it felt like it never grew closer until she found herself stumbling out into the cool afternoon sunlight filtering through a thousand leaves above her.

Poem: Good News

Do you hear their cries lord
As they raise them to you

Your name and your mothers name
The Holy Spirit and father
On their lips calling out
From cages where they sit alone
No mother
No father

Only you

Poem: Absolution

The rattling of countless coins
Making resplendent sounds
In deep coffers stashed in gilded temples
Trumpeting the sound of generations of absolution
Where sinners payed to atone for sins