ISSUE: Spring 2012
Crucifixes crowbarred from the apses
left their shadows, faint or imagined:
a false translation, like the Bibles
missionaries stacked along the driveway.
that morning everyone had a story
to share: in a bus in Jerusalem,
a theology student asked how Jews
spend the sabbath, asked the proper terms.
A Lutheran, he called himself,
smiling as if at a shared joke.
Since their Bibles had no Hebrew,
we brought them to the dumpster,
no need to bury them. That morning
a deer saw me cut through the woods:
not hunted for generations, indifferent.
To separate, we say when comparing
unlike things. Like the deer and the actor
who always tears a certain page
from the hotel Bible, otherwise he cannot sleep.
Like December 24th, when the study hall
knows only chessboards, little plastic kings
that add nothing to their night.
