Carly Wheelehan Turnidge

            Thirst

They woke at dawn to grind iron over fire for ink, skinned baby lambs
for vellum, those ancient monk scribes who gave us Jesus’ last words—
I thirst—whether he said it doesn’t matter. It’s that they believed it,
or at least I imagine they did, since they spent their life in holy tedium
for it. Then again I once said I’d die for a faith I didn’t really believe.  
I spent a year tossing pizzas to save enough to travel to Romania,
summer of 2002. One hundred zealous teens and I wandered the city,
performing crucifixion dramas, prayer walking, lying on the floor of a
defunct Soviet compound, feet swollen, voices crying out in horny
worship, guitar strums rising from the hot concrete remains of a revolt
over long before we were born. That kind of love can’t be sustained.
Eventually it faded, as it had to. One day I tried to pray in tongues
and could no longer drum up transcendence, no current pulsed through
my body—just some strange noises from my throat and the unholy
mania of my mind. Or at least that’s how I remember it. Thing is, if
I weren’t crazy for God, it would’ve been something else, some other
compulsion. Ideally something with more punk cred. After my divorce,
I had a friend named Tommy. Fresh from rehab, Bukowski inked
on his arm, he ran a kitchen of scumbags (his words). Once I borrowed
his copy of Ariel to find every poem missing, little square windows
on each page, cut with a razor. He said when his wife left, he carved
out the poems and pasted them to a canvas, threw paint at it, burned it.
Why did he keep the book’s carcass? Maybe it’s not that passion fades.
Maybe it’s that we find new cisterns to store it. Forever decanting it,
from vessel to vessel.

Did you enjoy this? Share your comments here.

Carly Wheelehan Turnidge is a poet and writer who runs a small regenerative flower farm in Gilroy, California. She holds an MFA from Ashland University and her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Nimrod International Journal, december magazine, Birdcoat Quarterly, San Pedro River Review, and RHINO Poetry.