Poetry by Taylor Franson-Thiel

    Lewin Bormann CC




Hymn for a Good Husband
       
​               With love

Wounds are a form of love, 
the man at the pulpit says. 

Who among us wouldn’t take 
a sword to the stomach for our beloved? 

And I know there are young saints 
in this audience who will take it 

literal. Let lovers bleed them empty. 
Like I did, with many preaching men

before meeting the one in whom 
safety and desire were the same thing. 

I let men whisper holy
over my body as they broke it.

Let church convince me
women who kneel are more worthy

than women who leave.
Not all of us are gods. 

No golden ichor to cauterize 
our skin whole again, no heavenly 

father to raise us from the dead.  
Now, a mortal man 

kisses my cicatrix filled palms 
and doesn’t ever ask who hurt me.





Birthrites

A little bit feral. That’s how I like my prophets. 
Foaming at the mouth with righteousness like my father, 
his father, and his. But for me, faith has never felt like a calming. 

More like there are two ways to survive a whirlpool. 
You can let it pull you under, or fight like hell to stay afloat. 
Either way you are going to suffer from the froth. 

I have always chosen bloody lip testimony, black eyed belief. 
White knuckled girl gripping at what came so easy 
to her ancestry. Men who never knew the word doubt. 
 
On my headstone, near the other family plots, 
they’ll engrave some scripture about steadfastness,
but it will not be my body they pray over.



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Taylor Franson-Thiel is a Pushcart nominated poet from Utah, now based in Fairfax, Virginia. She received her Master’s in creative writing from Utah State University and is pursuing an MFA at George Mason University. Along with writing, she enjoys lifting heavy weights and posting reviews to Goodreads like someone is actually reading them. 
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