Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021
Holy orders J. Lintu and I can do happy on 30 minutes a day and I can hear my youngest: Daddy, don’t save me and I can sing from a blank hymnal, happily and I can read Buddhists and cry, wanting a sucker and I can lick my way toward that sweet red sea. If I want to cross it, I will and I can turn a cashier’s head still and I can say I got money and I can sit at table with wife, healed by tea, honey. No more needful thing than her bullet mind; being shot at and I can pretend I’m St. Sebastian while my torso yet remains an egg-laden soufflé. Help me, doctor and I can take pills, and untake them. I can and I can wait for holiness, shaken and hard, ready to vomit if it all gets too pretty and I can be both burrito and sauced, even without a movie and the mysterious Mexican friends I always want and I can say hello middle-school cafeteria memories and I can fight the good fight with all my might and laugh at the spiders fleeing from my mouth and I can wear the friar costume and clap my hands without smiling at all, even though I am and I could pray all day, if you’d like, without thinking of you once, holding you the whole while
J. Lintu’s work has appeared in Visio, The West Wind Review, The Penwood Review, newversenews.com, earthsongs, and Foxfold Press, as well as forthcoming work in Aji Magazine, Absolution, and a chapbook-in-development from Impossible Press. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, J. happily lives a few minutes away from Multnomah Falls in Oregon.
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