This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer (June Road Press 2024).
Given
For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power,
and of love, and of a sound mind.
— 2 Timothy 1:7
We will die, each one. I preach this so the truth can’t catch us
by surprise. I make it a liturgy: One day we will die. And all
my people: We hear you, always hear you. I insist it to my dad
who knows truth the same way I do. Still, he bristles. Testifies
to good health, prophesies long years. Everyone will die. Each
time I say it, prepaying on sorrow. I make it a hymn. Sing it
while swimming. Over lunch. When a retriever pads past, golden
bleached from his muzzle. I lead a chorus as my dad turns over
the new old Camaro he keeps on my mom’s side of the garage.
He drives to a lawyer. Signs papers that say I will manage
the accounts if his sound mind slips. His lawyer calls it
a kindness, letting everything be settled. Now we know what
will happen. Though I keep preaching, in love. Sure as St. Paul
and surely as zealous. Professing: Death, I never thought
you weren’t coming.
Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024), named a 2025 Julia Ward Howe Award Notable Book, and the chapbook Brief Histories (Whittle Micro-Press, 2024). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Atlantic, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Image, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other places. She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire.
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, she lives in her hometown Boston, working as an advocate for the homeless, and teaching in the PoemWorks community.
