Counting Blessings By Bella Koschalk
Pulpit Anatomy of the third gender: dead swallow on the porch watching me falter at the wedding of thunder and sun. I am a student of the swallow’s shallow neck wound, whose lessons tighten this corset of girlhood. Swallow, your beak is the staircase to the altar where I am bared. Reverence, hand me the needle. Humility, cross-stitch my thighs like little answers.
Another Winged G-d The swallow’s slit throat is a strict master, but so is the rest of the flock; from the landing: a sinister perch, basking in the softness of blasphemy. The bird that dies in the hands of man asks me to become her g-d, but I learn I am falling all the time. Once in church: play dead. A body eating a body beneath that apocalyptic organ. I play nails through my wrists in church, g-d is guillotining all the girls; How do I parse such barbarics?
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