[Faith, rusting.]

A composition of iron oxides: steel, water and oxygen.

Choir room, floors swept to shining. Christ on a wall, oaken and ash-specked. His Body, grown
from lyric and tale. A singing preacher leaves his songs in the organ; he’s not the sort to take work
home. That evening, his wife says: “I wanted to love you. More than you love yourself.” She fixes
him voluptuous steak, ugly-crusted pies. She is not God, but he wants her to be. She is alive and he
can bite her ears, to test that life.

[Faith, iron-words.]

Funny orthography of God. Expect misusage. Expect mistakes deep enough to burn through any
alloy.

An infantry man drives a hatchback over a ditch. The truck leaps then hits the earth; the man feels
the lurch in his breastbones. The jerk of the vehicle strikes up memories, throat-nausea. Images: A
brown child with eyes shaped like a penny cut in half. A brown girl with death dark in her face,
floating toward him like a demon ghost. She clutched a hot, iron pomegranate and stared at his nose.
She closed her eyes when he pulled the trigger. God would forgive him, probably.

Whom did she fear?

[Faith, an apron of ocean.]

A hem of foam. Petticoat of froth. A lovely, translucent thing. A thing to be seen through?

An elderly man with melting muscles, shapeless as seawater. In a chair of creaking steel. He stares at
his television, watches a film about a spy who survives a chase, a plunge, a knife, a trigger, a pull,
Russians, Africans, Nazis, bishops, priests, friends, acid, detonating roses. He shits himself and
awaits a woman to rub away his excretions.

[Faith, like oxygen.]

Puff in and out. Suck in until the lungs are too-fat with air. Breathe out, and release, sweetly. Try
again. Fight corrosion, rust. Test your life.