Beth Gordon
Some days it’s easier to tell the people I love that there’s a palm reader in my head: a parlor of empty nests: a pile of rusted bikes. My heart is a tapestry of moonshine. It’s easier to cross-stitch a hummingbird’s heart. It’s easier to tell my best friend that she is part of my plan: she will pull me from a bath of acid & phlegm. It’s easier to tell every lover that I will die on their watch: that I never cared about ice makers or station wagons or orange wallpaper. It’s easier to tell my mother that instead of hymns & sermons I was listening to lawn mowers: to the spider spinning in the kitchen sink: to the wild strawberries before I bit into their bitter skin. Some days it’s easier to believe God exhaled the Milky Way. Conjured 100 billion planets. Poured rivers into our floating rock. Shook it like a snow globe to scatter dandelions & violets: walking catfish: hammerhead sharks: the souls of unrepentant women. It’s easier to count shooting stars than ponder unknowable beings without arms or legs who never speak with their mouths. Any story that begins with a dead baby is a prayer in reverse. Any story that beings with a freight train must be split open to extract its cursed cargo. I’m not saying that the baby & the train ever crossed paths. I’m saying that every prayer is a lie.
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Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, North Carolina. She is the author of five chapbooks, most recently Crone (Louisiana Literature) and The First Day (Belle Point Press), and one full-length collection, This Small Machine of Prayer (Kelsay Books). Her second full-length collection, Alchemist or Arsonist, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2027. Beth is managing editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, assistant editor of Animal Heart Press, and grandma of Femme Salve Books. She is on Instagram, Threads and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.