At first, it felt slick to the touch,
like a slab of raw bacon, she told me.
Then miniature bubbles frothed up
from what would have been pores
had the Bible been genuine leather.
Someone suggested they safeguard
the Good Book in Tupperware.
How else to contain both the Book
and its wondrous secretions?
Like honey from the lion’s skull,
God’s blessings pooled so abundantly
under the plastic lid, what could they do
but decant it to sell?
The woman I met was so earnest,
so tickled with her little vial
and the cloudy spurt of sanctity
contained within. “You know, miracles
happen all the time,” she told me.
“Why couldn’t this be a miracle, too?
If you can believe
in the resurrection, you can believe
in just about anything.”
The Oleaginous Bible
Elizabeth Lockman lives with her husband in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. Their farm is in the National Radio Quiet Zone, where they go about their days disencumbered by cell phones and wireless internet. After a fifty-year hiatus during which she raised their children and wrote prose, she resumed writing poetry seriously again in 2024. A number of her poems were published in the 1970s and 1980s.