It was so rooky
how the BloodGoodBabe first watered down the strychnine
for newcomers, so
their tolerance would be demi-god like
by the time they’d begin professing on their own,
but the power of prayer
is like yearning to strike your first match—
so terrified of something
somehow going terribly wrong:
Those confused children would
tip the glass to their lips
and that burn at the basin
of adrenaline liquefiying
the body like wind-blown Piggly Wiggly bags
so alive?
she could fill them
with anything she wanted.
Travis Blankenship’s poetry appears or is forthcoming from A cappella Zoo, Artifice, and Smash Cake magazines among others. He has been the recipient of a Tin House Writer’s Workshop scholarship, the Jim Wayne Miller Poetry Prize, a Geoffrey McClevly Memorial Award, and a Bondurant Prize in poetry. He founded the Goldenrod Poetry Festival now in its 6th year at Western Kentucky University. Currently, he is senior editor of the Yalobusha Review and lives in Mississippi.