Poetry from Stella Pfahler

God’s Square Mile

I imagined you struck by lightning, paralyzed and hanging in the air or above my bedside

isaiah 58:11 reading beneath you

I wanted to write you into verse psalm after psalm say it back to me echo like Presider: Congregation:

there is nothing like touch in electricity your hands

in water beneath a tall black sky

brushstrokes simmering beneath skin  draw me a riverside, blanketed in peaks considering the largeness on each side

and the smallness in the middle

you sheared the plastic off a car door handle with close­cut careful nails and murmured “cows” at every intersection whenever they appeared