"This Sunday in Ordinary Time" Peter Twal

[View this email on a browser]( [Forward to a friend]( [facebook-icon]( [tumblr-icon]( [twitter-icon]( September 14, 2018 [This Sunday in Ordinary Time]( [Peter Twal]( The swollen season gives birth to another police procedural, but who doesn’t love a good detective? A dead fall. A heater, angry to be awoken, burps up the summer’s burnt dust in my face. Before her cremation, the family swore they’d removed Nana’s wedding band, but all pockets turned up empty afterwards. It’s a miracle the ring hadn’t been lost sooner, dancing from finger to finger as her body’s bones made themselves known like a barn caving in a beam at a time. Infection spreads like fire across a small town. I’m passing through Logansport today, this Sunday in Ordinary Time. Barreling forward, forty-eight in a thirty to make Mass, when Mama says, why all this hurried death in your poetry? Bells at noon. I daydream of picking open a tabernacle with a wiry hair from my beard & a hairline sliver of silver to gorge on my crisp God, half-hoping Christ tries to intercede. The Bible tells me: “anyone who does evil hates the light,” & no matter how brightly I bite back, the Bible never changes its mind. Lord, help me to discern the difference between persistence & insistence, indulgence & rigor in every laugh, & the two chords my clavicles ring when plucked. Help me grin through their high pitch twangs, the way a good father listens to his child learn to play the violin. I’m still learning to pick up my feet when I walk, stumbling less through names of famous philosophers at smart parties & it’s Spring before anyone’s ready & I’m wondering how to build a case against the bees plotting to ball their queen to death without becoming a fanatic of my own. A death at the legs of so many lovers seems a difficult death to explain to children & this: if a button breaks your fall, it doesn’t make it luckier than other buttons. Listen: squint & it sings of simple addition. A kernel cooked in its own slick. & you, dear dear, forgive me when I take you for steak & say nothing after a second Sazerac, after you unwittingly spread horseradish on your bread instead of butter. [Like this on Facebook]( [Share via Twitter]( Copyright © 2018 Peter Twal. Used with permission of the author. [Twal reads "This Sunday in Ordinary Time."]( About This Poem “My mind tends to wander during Mass. For the most part, things snap back into the present moment when I hear a passage with which I disagree, but I still go to church because I am drawn to ritual, tradition, and ceremony. ‘This Sunday in Ordinary Time’ is about how I sometimes shy away from matters of actual consequence when asking myself, am I a good person? Of course, one need not be in church or subscribe to religion to be a good person, but it seems to be the place where I spend the most time drifting off and thinking, thinking, thinking.” —Peter Twal [Peter Twal]( Peter Twal is the author of Our Earliest Tattoos (University of Arkansas Press, 2018), which won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. An electrical engineer, he lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo credit: Indy Dhillon [Our Earliest Tattoos]( Poetry by Twal [Our Earliest Tattoos]( (University of Arkansas Press, 2018) "Service Station" by Danusha Laméris [read-more]( "A Memory" by Saeed Jones [read-more]( "The New Religion" by Chris Abani [read-more]( September Guest Editor: Rigoberto González Thanks to Rigoberto González, author of Unpeopled Eden (Four Way Books, 2013), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about [González](and our [guest editors for the year.]( [make a one-time donation]( [make a monthly donation]( [Small-Blue-RGB-poets.org-Logo]( Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit [Poets.org](. You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click [here](. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038 From Our Advertisers [Advertisement](