Learning to Multiply
Rachel Mennies
Generations back, one Christian woman
converted — her love in a skullcap, prostrate
before something unfathomable.
She yielded thirteen: an American tribe
of doctors and numbers men,
bewildered by the illogic of the Sabbath
candles’ glow, God’s unscientific tale-telling,
the stories of stories, books
of books, myths of survival, fear untreatable
by sertaline or liquor. Still, their children, we
average a sort of goodness, fill up whole pews
at Friday night services, mouth prayers
old as a thousand matriarchs, made
from symbols of mystery: A, aleph,
the round hump of bet, the cycloptic
pey. We pray together, orderly, to Adam —
that first honorable man,
with as many answers as God,
who watched the earth multiply
with creatures, beautiful as they were dumb.
From The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards
Available from Texas Tech University Press
[TTUP’s site seems to be moving. See temp page here.]
In the meantime, get the book via Amazon
Rachel Mennies is the author of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the 2013 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook No Silence in the Fields. Recent poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, and elsewhere, and have been reprinted at Poetry Daily. Since 2015, she serves as the series editor of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press. Mennies currently teaches writing at Carnegie Mellon University and is a member of AGNI’s editorial staff.
