Collection Plate
My Dad would give me a dollar
to drop down in the collection plate
amongst all the folded checks.
I wondered how they managed
to keep that plate so shiny–
the crimson velvet bottom,
like a bowl of blood, reflected
onto the sides –exposed
smears like transgressions.
I bet Muriel, or Garda,
or maybe even Marguirite
in her younger days, would wipe
it out during the week, leaving
the dish as gleaming and Baptist
as the water behind the pulpit.
Next week (and sometimes on Wednesday)
It’d go right back around,
zig-zagging through the pews,
getting grimier with every
unclean hand of the flock
the world’s week had stained.
Morning Glories
Six, and the sun slinks away the dew.
Beside the house, the four-wheeler warms up,
curling smoke into the tree limbs.
February is colder than knives,
and only driveway rocks are warm.
Drinking coffee on the screened-in porch,
she never saw the snake fully alive.
It flitted from across the yard into the gravels
and wound its camouflage body
like a morning glory vine.
Bob caught eye of the snake the second
he stepped outside, knowing these warm
few weeks would bring out the early risers.
His two boys were coming back
from the coop on the hill, trudging in boots,
when he whistled and pointed. They recoiled, immediately
sobered up from morning grogginess,
and observed the calloused head
shining in the sun like a fistful of pennies.
She saw Bob’s boot heel on its neck, and watched
as the frosty hoe blade lopped it
into clean-cut muscle chunks,
each piece writhing like a naked dying snail.
Tongues
The whole flock fell silent still
on the green pews watching God
shake the teenage puppet around,
the same way her father handled her
mother earlier that morning.
Hands in the pews slinked under legs–
the blonde best friend swallowed hard
to see Emily so violently divine,
to see one tongue split seven ways,
slinging words into the cupped hands
of the swollen pastor, praising forward
hundreds of holy, invisible strings.
The proud mother rocked uneasily
in the sling of her husband’s bronze arm,
blubbering Lord help her, Lord, Lord.
Then the girl lay still, panting
for breath, covered in a white towel
the deacon had thrown over her skirt
to maintain her decency.
A.C. Lambert is a Virginia native currently residing in Johnson City, TN, where he serves as President of East Tennessee State University’s creative writing society, Literati. He has published fiction (The Pub and Roy Harper) and poetry (Stone Face Rock, Ringling Bridge, etc.) online and in print, and was recently awarded by the city of Kingsport, TN for his poem “Huck Finn’s Sonnet 1.” He is the featured “Poet of the Month” (Nov. 2011) for The Single Hound literary journal.
