Vlad's Staff Pick Poem- Rebecca Hazelton

This is just a teaser of Rebecca's amazing poetry.


You Say the Burning Bush is Rhetoric

So what would you have me do? Flick his thigh
and wrestle him to the ground? You can't pin

a god. Such a thing unknots your hands, unweaves
your braided structure. Water can be wine as easily

as I might be a cricket chirping to the luminous bug zapper,
Oh Big Light, you are so very large. But you find even this

small bit of God vulgar, especially the cricket. God might
as well be a fingernail clipping. Cut the cricket —

just as the landlord trimmed a limb from the camphor tree.
For days our bedroom smelled like lip balm,

the kind I wore as a teenager to protect my mouth
from the rigors of unanswered lust, kisses that wore

me down until — how can there be no God, even a small one,
if you are always singing his name? You're not listening;

let me chirrup closer and I'll spell it out on your skin,
then you'll climb into the camphor's branches,

rhetorically, shake the leaves, and rustle its medicine down on me



Don't miss your chance to hear more of Rebecca's work, as well as that of Hadara Bar-Nadav, at our November 3rd Reading at Beaverdale Books!