This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes (Porkbelly Press 2024).
What’s an Atheist? I Ask My Dying Sister, 1965
A Christmas Eve visit
to a widow’s home.
She’s an atheist, our father hisses.
Don’t say a word about presents.
What’s an atheist? I ask
on the widow’s doorstep.
She puts a finger to her lips,
tightens her grip on my hand.
Someone who doesn’t believe
in God. In Jesus. In heaven.
Not even in heaven? I whisper.
Where will she go when she dies?
In a box. In a hole.
In the dirt.
The poems of B. Fulton Jennes have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including Comstock Review, MER, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is the winner of the 2025 Subnivean Award, the 2023 Millennium Award, the 2022 Lascaux Prize, as well as many other poetry competitions. Her collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. A third chapbook, Dirty Bird & Myrt, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2026. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer and hosts “Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners,” a monthly online reading series.
Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised. Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz
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