The Glory of Women
on sunday mornings you sing
glory to god & it’s palm sunday
there’s more singing more holy water
incense scattered down pews to tuck
everyone into place this palm sunday
it carries you up to the altar
where a wafer floats on incense
to your tongue—everyone in line
& you can’t remember the altar
or the body of christ or
the hand that put it on your tongue
you’re thinking about Her
body between your thighs & how
you want to grow a palm tree out back
& you think you’ll fold the fronds
into a thousand tiny crosses the palm
tree is only yours when She’s not looking—
a thousand whispers when She sings
This selection comes from the book, Lineage, available from Dancing Girl Press & Studio. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano .
Emily Holland is a lesbian poet pursuing her MFA at American University. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes. She has work appearing or forthcoming in publications including bedfellows, Screen Door Review, FOLIO, and Nat. Brut. Her poems explore themes of queerness, place, familial lineage, and investigate the Southern pastoral. She works at The Writer’s Center, where she is currently the managing editor for Poet Lore.
Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate.
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