Ben Kline
A Lisp
The priest said any boy with a lisp has forsaken God. He cupped an ear with his hand. Listen for the devil’s breath sliding through the fork of his tongue. I nodded like several nearby uncles, turned my missal to the Sanctus. I’d kept my tongue against my teeth for years. Hold them by the neck and press your thumbs into their unripe apple.
He never explained why God would abandon anyone. Or why it was the devil’s breath. When I asked one of the aunts, she leaned on her hoe and shifted her wide brim, as if she might see the answer falling. The good Lord tries his best, hon. Some sinners just enjoy the ruin too much. I knew it wasn’t ruin. When the salt stings it means you’re still alive.
Holler Psalm 6:02
Bless your femurs of iron ore. Grandma said hers too were once sturdy in winter ice, stern against summer’s august core. May they steel you through Manhattan canyons. Bless your flinty olecranon, sparking every time your uncle shattered empty bottles against it, your silica ulna a shield your father envied behind his silent concessions. He was all talc, clavicles slack under his brother’s weighty rage. Bless your phosphate kneecaps. Bless your graphite nails and feldspar fingers graphing strangers in the dark without leaving a mark. May they always pleasure the world. Bless the quartz click clack of your nails on your manual typewriter, the poems you wrote when your mother refused to play along, called herself coal, absorbing any light she could, stowing it in her marrow of slick mud and thick silt, a sinking you learned as love. May your chalk wrist continue saying otherwise, swinging below the line, belts, drawing stall art, new memes, and last names, a life in the margins. Bless the shale storing your past behind your sternum. Bless the dolomite sockets of your diamond eyes, set to stun straight on or from the side, depending on the fella, day, and time. Bless your gypsum lips. You know why.
Five Months
—after “X-Static Process” by Madonna
I’m not myself since Mom died. Not since, when I asked if she knew about the pericardial effusion, Dad cried. I’m not myself in the lines of new poems between which I lie about the past when Dad says she died of vaccine-clotted alveoli, not twenty-six hours of cardiac arrest. I’m not myself in the closet searching her photo albums for the one captioned Ben, 5 months: I’m swaddled in her arms, her tongue out, her hair its longest ever after she spent my first months alive at a hospital. I wasn’t yet myself in her open palms, my nose pointing to orange oak leaves. I’m not sure what broke her heart: a conspiracy, pharmacology, or me, if she looked down and wondered how she’d give a damn. I’m not sure I should know, but I’m not myself, not in this poem or any other, unless I do. I’ve tried to find the words to pretty her yeah, her scowl when I came around too loud with names of men in New York and San Francisco, swallowing her insults and my lovers alike, cud I’ve held down, sour but true, I don’t know how I’m supposed to be, every day, Dad says, it’s harder every day, and the photo has no words for my blank screen.
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Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks Sagittarius A* and Dead Uncles, as well as the forthcoming collection It Was Never Supposed to Be, he is a storyteller, Madonna podcaster, and poet whose work has appeared in Poet Lore, Copper Nickel, MAYDAY, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Poetry, and other publications. He can be found online at benkline.wordpress.com, and his X handle is @BenKlinePoet.