Devotion

Devotion

Kelsi Folsom

Sometimes the wind scatters light across the lake’s wrinkles, tosses clarity to Peter’s loss of Christ. — Isabel Chenot, “Lake Michigan”

I can’t make the distance
work for me.

It’s too long.

It’s too far.

I can’t see what’s around
the bend, all the bends
never end. I take a knee

dizzy under the weight
of amends I can’t
make work for me.

Piety promised peace
but what it gave
me was anxiety
by the stemfuls
of wine promising
peace would come
with one more drink.

Give me this tourniquet,
the one I have made
the one with holes in it
the one with no name.

Because the only one
whose name in pieces
like a matzah snowflake
of absolution and mercy

mirrors wholeness where
cracks crawl through
wounded faces is

the man whose ghost treads
the waves of Galilee

in a salt-baptized
wind blowing
Grace upon grace
upon grace upon
grace becoming
thumbs of ash-smeared

Relief closing
the distance
and working
for me.

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Kelsi Folsom
Poet & Musician

Kelsi is the author of three collections of poetry including Breaking the Jar (FLP, 2022), and has work published in Soul Lit, The Caribbean Writer, West Texas Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a M. A. student in Theopoetics and Writing at Bethany Theological Seminary and splits her time between writing, homemaking with her husband and four kids, and performing live. Find more of her work at www.kelsifolsom.com.

Photography by Kristaps Ungurs