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a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society

David P. Miller


Why This Page Is Blank

Because boiled weeds, with feed
that donkeys will not eat,
aren’t allowed to mean starvation
if someone’s throat is open.

Because children who play dead
next to their bleeding classmates
don’t get complex grownup stuff
and can’t outtalk the pundits.

Because Just stop killing us
doesn’t lock thumbs up like
Put your hands on ten
and two, because both sides.

Because my college theater friend
who worked three part-time jobs
to buy bare-bones health insurance
died in bed at thirty-seven.

Because let us reason together.
Because civil discourse, and let
he who is without sin.
Because the truth lies somewhere

between lunar sex slave colonies
and knowing who’s the boss.
Because I despair of writing
words that aren’t already dust.

(with thanks to Richard Hoffman for the title)


The Target of Your Prayers

I might speak with you about bedding pollinator plants,

a patch for bees. About early morning pearl clouds.

You might pause, reply with a brochure: bodies

bathed to the waist in cartoon flames, praying

to One who abandons them in foretold fury.

 

How a downy woodpecker searches and strikes;

blue jays’ solid-bodied tree trunk landings;

memories held by paving stones. A schoolgirl

balances coffee on an open book, riding the city bus.

I’ll pause for each of these. You show me a picture:

 

woman with lips sewn shut for speaking her faith.

Proof, proof, you claim, of them, them, the dark,

the opposite of us, us. Yes, yes, I know. I know:

that approach to torture is not our heritage style.

The people we resemble do things differently.

 

Modest, what I’d live for. Maple leaves rendered to red dust

by a thousand soles. Pet python, olive cream, rides

in a net bag slung across a shoulder. Flattened chipmunk

an offering for assembled crows. Paper money filling the hat

of subway singer Lonesome Phil. Make all this unreal,

 

call your preferred tormentor, if you must. What I most fear

are worship’s whips. Self-roused agonies, rages at the podium:

our terrified, solitary minds and their closet monsters.

Let private excruciations be the target of your prayers.

 

Turned from your mirror and praying, turn back to it.

Watch the face of your God through your own face.

You image my body in seared skin and sizzling bones.

You speak my torment for me. Speak for your own.

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David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have received Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations, and have appeared in Meat for Tea, Lily Poetry Review, Reed Magazine, LEON Literary Review, Solstice, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, Kestrel, Vincent Brothers Review, and Nixes Mate Review, among other journals. His poems “Interview” and “And You” were included in an issue of Magma (UK) focused on teaching poetry to secondary school students. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with his wife, the visual artist Jane Wiley. He serves on the New England Poetry Club’s Board of Directors, and is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets.


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