photo by erica harris

Determinism

The argument stretched and rolled like yarn
In the paws of G-d.  The problem of evil was toyed with,
the problem of hiddenness, the one of what I want to do
I do not do, but what I hate I do: Why did we always give ourselves away
With a squeak, when He was safely distracted by that fucking yarn?
We never knew what was in the mind of G-d
When His tail flicked like that.
Excitement?—When the boy got lost,
We beseeched Him and posted flyers.  When the body was found,
We listened to the rabbis: G-d wanted it.
—Or possibly it was boredom with this tired yarn
That always ends the same way.
Whatever was made was made
Out of green acrylic.

It was my theology or affliction.

My first memory
was a story my mother told
which never happened.

My second memory
was unphotographed and lost forever.

When I left a woman,
I left her twice

and I felt
just what I’d watched
others feel
while I sat open-mouthed before the screen.

Shannon Holman, New York, 2002

published in Raised in a Barn

for Debbie Benson

Others have their own fires. Ours started small,
an accident with a cause: lens of ground glass, fire ants,
paper from a pack of cigarettes.
We ran into the woods to wait out what would happen
and, while we were not what we wanted,
we were what we were.
Clutched together, our breathing
became a third person, all smiles, without much English.
Puckers on both knees, sap in the scabs, tarry, sweet.
What we tasted: red hots and cut grass,
and you had a doll that wet,
which you left there, and another with a crank for growing hair.
Let x equal kiss,
because when we changed we changed the language.
The sun was not harmless. It was no egg in the air.
We strung up our clothes in the virgin forest
and sang I’m your pusher. For virgin, read
where the small trees fail. We started there.
We caught. And after? We smoked. And after that? We smoked.

Shannon Holman, New York, 2001

“It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera, except that it hurts”
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

We took confetti in our mouths
and wished on everything:
bridges, pennies, cars with one headlight,
train tracks, matches, first stars.

We were the Corps of Engineers
calling out to our veins, Will the dam hold?
And the dam was matter.

Under the same old moon,
Chögyam Trungpa drank whiskey
the color of holy robes. His hands trembled like pages
and he said, Whose hands, whose birds are these?

We rode skateboards
impossibly fast
down the helix of the parking tower
and didn’t feel the need to repudiate our bodies,
and didn’t foresee.

The thing of it was
time still came back after all that,
us scrambling up the banks of the Vermilion River
with giant flowers on fire in our arms like flags,
that night of the surprise frost that caused the bees to waltz
from the petals giddy with solidarity as we sang out,
“She-loves-me-she-loves-me-not,”
as we recited mathematics,
as compassion
stained us like pollen,
and we shared the orange juice that was the only thing in the world,
as the various shapely contestants
for Miss Meaning of the Universe
disported for our favor.

Cause and effect, snap,
the brutal angels
clothed themselves
in smoke and lurched
away, leaving us
with breath and lack,
systole and diastole alone
in the maw of the world

and we swallowed
asked for water

in our bodies as in a large room
whose exit we have misplaced

and we and the suns and planets
were juggled for a while, then dropped

Shannon Holman, New York, 1995-1999