She'd tell us "our bodies are not made of stone" so treat them like flesh.
Renee EmersonJuly 27, 2021
Soren Kierkegaard once said Martin Luther might as well have married a “wooden plank” Katherine, Kette, hidden in herring barrels, driven into town to hunt a husband, of all the renegade nuns, so young, eyes roving from the cloister, she refused to be “placed,” so you wed her. Doctor Hammer-in-Hand, you were never a “sexless log,” six children and a hoard of orphans clustered in the Black Cloister homestead. Nowadays, Katie’d be a keeper – queen of sustainable living, herbal…
Renee EmersonDecember 30, 2017
Charlotte Elliot No one wants to come just as they are to the Lord. Only children, who go just as they are to anything – rumpled hair at the wedding, shoes on the wrong feet at Grandma’s. Too young to have learned better, to carry a disapproving sneer to their closets and mirrors. We come to the altar with bloodied knees and hands, we come to the Lord praying “Just as I am” And maybe, yes, it is possible to…
Renee EmersonDecember 30, 2017
I bask beneath this eye, sun roving our marriage bed, sheets bunched together like gathered wheat. Your side empty and cool now, already you work the fields. I take more than my portion, I turn slow as the moon in daylight hours. You, husband, have always given me more than I can carry, such weight I’ve not known (only, before, a dead husband’s hand, an old woman weeping). Even good things have weight—a harvest, a child turning his slow discoveries…
Renee EmersonSeptember 1, 2015
Ruth and Boaz Dine Grapes, sweet and cool, ornament the table. Blue-veined cheeses on wooden slats, rosemary and garlic. Bread with gold-toasted crust, a soft-melt inside. Olive oil pooling in bowls, gleaming eyes. She bites a pear, breaks the skin. She tears the bread, dips and dips again. I would like to be the bread in her hands: warm, broken for her, sustaining. Renee Emerson is the author of the poetry collection Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014). Her…
Renee EmersonSeptember 1, 2015