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2021 Fred Shaw Poetry Prize

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Youth: A Sermon

by Maylin Enamorado-Pinheiro

 

1 My skin bronzed copper, I flexed and plowed. The soil streamed from one neighbor’s piling news, to the welcome stones lined crooked towards the door. In the yard, a dull pigeon sought high nesting in buttresses of pine, which had leaped from their seedy starts. A head poked for light beams. But the hammering woodpeckers tore my attention in two. Oh, the window-framed sea glass, piecing together a fallen saint. His eyes glowed beneath veiled light and stayed fixated on the ceiling. His hands clasped a cross, tight like old bolts. I wanted to ask how this made him safe. Whether he’d bet his father’s life on it; if he’d bridge it between two hills and lead a guild across. 2 My brother tossed sticks into the coal pit of the school yard. This meant winter: the start of sleigh rides on trash can lids; body heat. Father Ben frowned upon our antics. Damn Protestant kids stirring trouble! Caught rowing in the baptismal water. We ripped a pew to race in and took it apart in the attic. We confess, Father Ben. We broke the cellar doors and stole the wine. But we left the bread. That child is unwelcome in our guts; stale as your breath as it grants us forgiveness. 3 As children, the games are all sinister. “Let us tear the head off a lion! We shall build a castle for it in the kitchen, then send each brick roaring home like cataracts over dinner tables, amen. Amen.” From the pine tree, high up in shrouds of cotton, I’d teeter on a tapered branch and watch my brother climb like a feral wolf in a cardboard crown. And the closer he came, the quicker his mouth foamed, his eyes slit narrow, and his claws would sprout. A full grin of fangs emerging like doubt and devils in the mocking, winter sun. So I only dream of two things: the priest, beating his chest as he coughs a plague; his fingers spindled around a cigar, and my brother with thick fur, one branch away, yelling, “I am coming, I am almost there.” Before I wake, they end like this: I become too heavy, and the poor bough, just breaks.





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