Alicia Cole

A Conversation about James Foley

It's this man, his voice sweet and creeping
like honeysuckle vines twined with poison
oak, who says, how can we live knowing
his experience was closer to salvation
than ours.  The way he was hooded
and cuffed in the desert. Deserts, after all,
epitomize guilt and salvation, honey
and locusts and the future of severed
heads, cousins with crossbeams marring
their brow. These men, I say, are not
James Foley, though they each enjoyed
their body’s coiled elegance. Death.
Dearth. The unspooling passion of not
being able to communicate. He smokes.
I sicken myself: that mouth, spilled flower
that bloomed like the desert's foliage,
cut off with a shudder and a wilt, a heave
and a spit. Same old story, though Jesus
may have handled it more stoutly, and J.B
got a better final view. Honey, J.B. says,
was better in the desert – not fouled,
not cut off from the source and dancing,
no closer to salvation. The apologies on this
earth are limited. A dripping sword is still
a dripping sword, and never carries the
weight of sorry. Nails make for sturdier
constructions, and there’s always a carpenter
or his mother weeping when they fail.
Perhaps terror provides the bridge we later
follow when we’re able, when we’re not
masked by the singular note of an exiting
lover. I sicken myself with this juxtaposition.
My sword-bloodied hands; my fists like
hammers; my beard brushing the hood.
And really all I wanted was for you to show
more courage, dear, to not name yourself
warrior when so many are perishing standing
in a vast world of spiritual inequity. Really,
what’s the breakup when James and Jesus
and J.B. all got murdered. I spit on the ground
in memory. They say nothing new comes after
the head is severed, and neither James nor
John (oh, J.B., oh) reawakened pre-reincarnation,
so which one are you? I swear, what stupidity –
the depths I’ve plunged with this shiftless heart.


Alicia Cole lives and writes in Huntsville, AL.  She's the editor of Priestess & Hierophant Press, and a visual artist.  You can find her at www.priestessandhierophant.com and www.facebook.com/AliciaColewriter.

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