Moriah

Ian Rhodewalt

The desert becomes

a soup of glass: I cannot return to the woman who
holds the rain and the sun. This final altar still holds

me, the bloodied ram rises
from his freeze of death, his newborn
bellow spits out the metal of my father’s knife.

The bloody but unbloodying

ram picks up his
life and backs
into the dogwood leaves.
Eels of
sweat climb up my legs, pearling and dissolving

into my skin, my father pulls away his
faith from the shadow of my neck. A fire

made of shredded clouds speaks to my father
with a voice stained by the sky
saying,
“Me from son only your son
your held with not have you
since God fear you that know
I now for him to anything do
or boy the on hand your lay
not do. Abraham,

Abraham!” Donkey and servants wait for him at the mountain’s foot,

he slips his blade

subtly into the folds of his robe. Pressing the death of his lips
against my brutal forehead, soft tears twist their way up
the cracks of his stone cheeks,
into his hard black eyes.

Ian Rhodewalt, a recent Oberlin graduate, is a poet and prison abolitionist from Southeastern Pennsylvania and Northeastern Vermont. His work has previously appeared in Plum Creek Review and Wilder Voice.