Photo by MART PRODUCTION
by Gary Fincke
After the teacher’s writing student’s accidental death, he copies her poem about the possibilities of love, reforming the imagery for desire with intricate loops and decisive lines. Her setting is the garden of St. Paul tended by two ancient nuns who, each day, inspect the light altered by arrangements of decorative trees. Who prune, monthly, the rose bushes to allow kneeling for the raised right hand of a smiling Mary. Her lines are a gospel of surfaces, touch by touch where nerves nearly breach the skin. They detail the sacrificial blossoms on the topiary that shadows the deep erosions from April’s storms. And then, at last, she shifts to a statue of the garden saint, his blessed hand smooth from centuries of kisses, her poem ending in an astonishment of prayer.
Gary Fincke’s latest flash collection is The Corridors of Longing (Pelekinesis, 2022). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
