Pentecost

Pentecost

Alyssa Stadtlander

One is the forsythia blazing
like Moses’ bush that was once the home
of hundreds of tiny angels or maybe
just one angel with an abundance of wings

And if one is the way this bush lights up
like a bonfire at the beginning of every April

then two is the lightning
that rends the midwestern sky
in half and then into fissures blinking
like a baseball thrown through a windshield

And if two is the way the atmosphere
thunders with voltage like sound of rivers melting

then three is the fingernail moon
and garden towers of violet muscari
and the honey bees feasting and the sunrise
lapping up the pond by the baseball field

And if three is the joyous tongue that drinks from
from the bank of the creek by the highway

then one is the magnolia that blooms one week out of fifty-two,
whose petals drop silently like,
two, the water that poured forth from his eyes
that locked with mine, like Moses striking the rock

Which makes three the holy ground of the library
where he finally wept, and the dirt under the daffodils
that light like solitary candles at the altar, or
the blooming of the forsythia branches

which is one, and two, and three-
in-one-in-three
in me

---

Alyssa Stadtlander
Writer & Actress

Alyssa Stadtlander is a writer and actress based in Boise, Idaho. Her work is published in Mudfish Magazine, Fathom, The Windhover, and others, along with several anthologies, including An Homage to Soren Kierkegaard: A Poetry Anthology, edited by Dana Gioia and Mary Grace Mangano.  She is the recipient of the 16th Annual Mudfish Magazine Poetry Prize, judged by Marie Howe. For more, visit her website at www.alyssastadtlander.com.

Photography by Angelica Reyn