Far Country
How cruel is a ring of keys to that far country,
Fair or fine, fey or final when there is no apparent way
for me to easily unlock the heavy door?
I cut my feet until they run with gangrene, yellow sores
on broken bricks, obligatory shards of golden glass.
My thought is I’ll find hominess in Heaven.
God will meet me with a bowl of soup, reward me
for my endless efforts, trade me for his autograph.
It’s chaos here. My brain shoots pricking neon ads
behind the rods of my closed eyes. This is no
picnic lunch, this endless, endless mining
of what once was my green garden of a soul.
Cherryl E. Garner manages a small law office in South Carolina. Her poetic interest is in exploring family, landscape, the common and the divine in any forms that seem best to fit, and she waits patiently for an acceptable theory of everything. In the past several months, her work has been included in IBPC, The Rose & Thorn, The Petigru Review, an upcoming anthology on string theory entitled Riffing on Strings and damselfly press.