Short-Haired Girl Goes to Church
The church at the mouth
of the hollow
says
we can cut down
the mountains
because God
will come again
and make them new.
In Sunday school
I ask
what we’re supposed to do
when the mountains
are all dust and rubble?
The teacher says
God will provide
for the faithful.
Winter Solstice
After squalls fill the hollow
I fear the light,
which has nearly folded
its purple into laurel,
will splinter on a porcupine’s orange teeth
as it rakes the white ribs of a dead coyote,
vibration sending the tiny bones
in my inner ear to search for less brittle
sound in the horns of water
ice curls behind mid-stream rocks
or the places where deer
melt snow to the oval shape
of their heat.
Noah Davis’s manuscript Of This River was selected by George Ella Lyon for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry. It is now available, and includes these poems. Noah’s poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Best New Poets, Orion, North American Review, River Teeth, Sou’wester, and Chautauqua, among others. He earned an MFA from Indiana University and now lives with his wife, Nikea, in Missoula, Montana.
Read two poems by Noah Davis previously appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo Ioana Catalina E, courtesy Shutterstock.
