Dressing the Girl and the Well, Tissington Bruges lace, chosen by the women of the family, stitched into a First Communion dress, swathing the brown sticks of a girl-child -- arch, fond, and so oddly bridal -- talisman against defilement, staving off time's bruising. A congregation gathers for Consecration's simile -- to crystalize the moment that, they guess, is not of but just before reason, still mild with childhood's upspring and benison, life's savagery still unriled -- all she and they would be losing. So, once, from their poxed, uneasy clime villagers huddled to dress this well -- to clay and salt the boards, and bower with flower-petal pigments -- tell a sub-plot of their desperate salvation, to say thanks and please over the virginal flume, like their dwindling mirror ringing the deep stones' knell. They decrypted their dry fields for marks of mercy, dour unyielding skies for benediction's hour, desperate to quell a daughter's new wine, a village's need, with grace's chaste inundation.
Jennifer M. Phillips is an immigrant, retired Episcopal Priest and AIDS Chaplain, gardener, grower of Bonsai, painter, and has been writing and publishing poetry and prose since age seven. Phillips grew up in upstate New York and has lived in New England, London, New Mexico, St.Louis, Rhode Island, & Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her work has won several awards and appeared in over fifty journals. Her two chapbooks are Sitting Safe in the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press 2022).
Grand Little Things 