PROSE POETRY
SHANE INMAN
HOLY
It was the year they burned Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. You called me while I watched carolers march like miniature army men on the news. They must have been singing old songs because I didn’t recognize any of them. I felt I had tuned in to a channel from another country; maybe yours, maybe no one’s. That spring, before everything, you told me you had no scarf to wear for Easter. I held one in the market, goldfinch yellow and sheer enough to see my future in the lines of my palm. I dropped it and sent you figs instead. The moment they entered America the fruits became illegal, which is just forbidden with its teeth pulled out. You went to church with an uncovered head and I told you that Jesus is the forgiving sort, though no one forgives anyone, not really. It was the year which began and did not end, the year which started long before it began, the year a murder of crows carried my first and last letters to you. By the winter you still believed in holy places—mausoleums and mass graves, stone sanctuaries and the rubble they became under the heel of jackboots. My faith was too narrow. The year taught me to believe only in the unholy, in the inferno without a counterpart. It was the year I learned how to speak and the year I forgot every word I knew. A year cardinal red. We spotted a bobwhite in the meadow, remember? We shouted its name like we could call it back to us, as if we knew we would never see it again and one brush with miracle hadn’t been enough. Bobwhite turn this way. Bobwhite perch for a while. Bobwhite the snow has already begun falling again. In the new year I fed your name to my plants and they shed their leaves like old feathers. I pushed paper into my mouth and waited patiently for the ink to dissolve. Sometimes we are so full of blood that all we can do is reach for the leeches.
Shane Inman’s work appears in Consequence, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Journal, The Forge, Bourbon Penn, Mud Season Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in the southwest and lives in Philadelphia.
