Prick of the Spindle: Poetry: Harlan-Ferlo: Ash Wednesday Fantasia

Ash Wednesday Fantasia
By Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo

We’ve come in from the rain for Lent’s beginning,
first of many solemn days. In the windowless,

wood-walled church, we speak somber, answer soft.
We’re in mid-mutter when the ashes float

up from their small glass bowl. They pour out sudden,
cascade down in billowing snakes. At the floor’s touch

they split, prismatic, to colored shimmers, widening
strands like smoke slither toward us. Ashes climb

my legs, my feet gone green, rust swirling up
to my waist. Colored ash swoops, splotching

turquoise, umber. Language stops, our open mouths
choke on viscous ochre, magenta, malachite.

The bare walls suck in, the lights blare. The priest stares
at his purpling hands and we clutch ourselves

where it stains, confessing. A woman tears at her throat
in blinding green, a man scrapes at his chartreuse belly.

The church fills with fluorescent howl as they mark us, opaque
over cheekbones and foreheads, exposing our faces as masks.

Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo received her MFA from the University of Oregon. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Burnside Review, Poet Lore, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Anglican Theological Review, and Ghoti. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches in the Philosophy and Religion Department and serves as a chaplain at Oregon Episcopal School.