Discarded Sermon 9
by Benjamin Bellas
collage by John Bingley Garland, ca. 1850–60
Shhhhhweet sassle-frassle, the good Lord came to me and said, “The only church you need is a freshly sharpened axe and enough breath to reach the forest’s edge.”
2 I bring mine hands and dip them in the marrow of god’s glory, god’s great salivating abundance.
3 I dip mine thighs in spring water, spilled forth from the depths of my mother’s karst body, carried over rock to rock, pebble to pebble; a carving blade that draws fluid shapes in the landscape – I bathe.
4 All day the bees fill their hives with wax and honey; while a weevel weaves its way through a box of mac & cheese in a Dollar Tree – what parting gifts does the Lord insist you bring home to your emaciated table?
5 Good grassle my vascular masses, the Lord has come to me and said, “Every possible human thought is dangerous.”
6 Consider this, when I was a child, we’d make flat stones kiss the pond over and over as we repeatedly insisted on the dramatic reenactment of each bee’s flight– we’d throw stones and call out the honeybee’s favorite blossoms each time they made contact with the water,
“sweetclover! dandelion! alfalfa! thistle!”
7 Oh glory to be these eusocial insects & make the magic of tactile life luxurious, to make the hillsides roll and the valleys plunge with efflorescence.
8 My swine, my sow, I’ve been around for some time now, and in every valley I’ve found a chapel filled with lost, half-sucked lifesavers; customarily stuck to the lowest quality tear-stained carpets.
9 I prayed and prayed on this, and the Lord came to me in the night and said, “You’ve got a real wet mouth, don’ t cha?”
10 And all the while morning glories strangle weed stalks creekside in the valley; the dew drops, the dawn rises, and the world is fundamentally still the same.
11 My trash collecting ambassadors, the Lord gave us hands to manipulate his majesty– for every artist-slash-author needs editors, and we are just dumb enough to fancy ourselves as saviors.
12 And so I says to him, “Is it sacrilegious my dear Jesus, if I install in this church a boiler or furnace; What is your policy on any heat, fire, or flame at all?”
13 And the Lord says, “ How’s
your baby? How’s your baby
doing? How’s that bun in
the oven? How’s your new
{ bay-bay-baaay – bee }? Did you ever think you could love something so naked, so vacant?”
14 Once, a grieving mother, my aunt actually, asked me, “When we are born, why does the Lord make us but wood moths dangling in abandoned webs–” what I think she meant is, why give life to us as wind chimes who have forgotten the words to our very own song?
15 When I was a child, we’d make flat stones kiss the factory’s windows, we thought it was abandoned, but it was just closed by the time it rolled around to 3pm.
16 We’d celebrate every pane turned spider’s web by calling out the names of their favorite prey, “bumblebees! crickets! mosquitoes! siblings!”
17 You see, the answer to that vilomah’s question lies in what my cousin said as we collected ammunition & justified our positions, he said, “Look, all I ’m sayin’ is that the only difference I see between a crowbar and god, is the profile of its face.”
Benjamin Bellas currently lives in Miami, Florida. His work is forthcoming or has been featured in Redivider, Hunger Mountain, Jet Fuel Review, Sinking City, The Nelligan Review, Bellingham Review, The Broadkill Review, Qu Literary Magazine, Fives (A Companion to Denver Quarterly), and The Pinch, amongst others.
