qarrtsiluni

by Lois Marie Harrod

after Keith Ekiss’s “Pima Road Notebook”

No one told me there is no god.
I changed hymnals from month to Sunday–

Red, brown, dog-eared, Missouri Synod.
Sermons didn’t amount to a hill of beans

which have more protein than eggs
but lack silk and pin feathers.

The Episcopalians served coffee
and the Methodists, Oreos after the service

which I screwed apart and licked
until nothing was left but a smear.

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Lois Marie Harrod’s 11th book, Brief Term, was published by Black Buzzard Press (2011), and her chapbook Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest (Iowa State University). Her chapbook Furniture won the 2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize. Previous publications include the chapbook Firmament (2007); the chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out (2005); Spelling the World Backward (2000); the chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999); Part of the Deeper Sea (1997); the chapbook Green Snake Riding (l994), Crazy Alice (l991) and Every Twinge a Verdict (l987). She won her third poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. Over 400 of her poems have been published online and in print journals, including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Verse Daily and Zone 3. A Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, she teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read more at her website.