by Colleen Abel
When I got out from under the damp tongue of the priest’s sermon, there was something I was finally ready to declare something grave: God as the great naught God as un— not ur— All I held: fictionalia & then I went to the castle of bones the bunk- beds of martyrs with God yawning from the clammy tufo requiring nothing Heresy is easy scoffs the marble saint the axe marks in her neck say try believing & there was something I was— finally ready to ____
Colleen Abel is a disabled writer living in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in venues such as Lit Hub, Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, REMAKE, won the 2015 Editors Prize from Unicorn Press. She has two chapbooks, HOUSEWIFERY (dancing girl press) and DEVIANTS, a hybrid work about stigmatized bodies that won Sundress Publications’ 2016 Chapbook Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from UW-Madison’s Institute for Creative Writing and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is the Poetry Editor of Bluestem magazine and Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University.