cal freeman / poem

A Synod

About the barely quaffable stuff

the angels are imprecise,

strife they’ve un-stoppered

pours out in little increments,

the digital nose on the thing.

I’m measured, they’ve measured me

out one ounce of it. Meanwhile,

there’s a religious figure

in a cassock leaning over

a bed of lavender impatiens,

but the rectory where 

the scene takes place is closed

down with a sign on the door

that says “danger.” 

It isn’t always wonderful

when a hierophant addresses angels,

too many echoes

for a sticky summer night.

Yet there are ways 

to humanize vocations. Yet

we never needed ways

to expurgate desire. The end

of it pours—I was going

to say micturates—into the river.

The possibility, that I find anyway,

in celestial beings is that they might

eschew the norming impulses

of our language. We’ve addressed

a multitude of stars. Maybe now

we’ll call the river what it is.

---

Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Panoply Zine, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North's Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released, and his hybrid full-length collection, The Weather of Our Names, is due out this year from Cornerstone Press.