POEM
The Offering
I wasn’t refusing you when I refused the drink.
It was wine and I don’t want it anymore.
I sit in a room, stuffed with heavy furniture
like the kind at Aunt Mary and Uncle Tim’s house.
I can still smell the curtains in their
reading room. I feel them in these cushions
and in the wood. I feel them in this wood.
I walk outside to where the birds are blue and flies
don’t bite. I watch lizards bathing on stone walls.
I recline in a comfortable chair among
curled leaves, dusted dry as eyelashes
close my lids to the breeze that brings the ocean
to the fire road winding its way up these hills.
I need to feel my every inhale, my chest as chalice
holding my own attention as though I was
the sacred page being read each day in the
front room by the monks here, who are praying.
They have let me stay for the night. They have kept the wine.
I pull my thick hair back to let the air in. My skin is soft
in the middle of day. The California Oaks lean with the sun
and shade well over me. There are times I do not speak.
molly jane burns