Jill Magi
Soy Products: They might be high in sodium but they are not meat.
They are made by Loma Linda and Worthington foods,
two Adventist companies like Harris Pine Mills
where most of the Adventist Academy poor kids
and kids of color worked to pay off their tuition
or the Little Debbie factory near Southern College
where Jerry Czerkasij from the Ukraine got his hand caught
in a roller and had to have reconstructive surgery
but they said he was never the same, the arm just hung there.
Some soy projects are rubbery like what are called Scallops
and some of it, like NuMeat, is a mushy loaf, a kind of paté that you push
out of the can by opening both ends and some soy products are frozen
like FriChik which come six to a box shaped like tiny flat drumsticks
or Steaklets, which my grandmother, whose father
was a butcher, used to make in a rich cream sauce.
A Stone
You are in the company of your twin sister
and another schoolmate,
crossing a common in the city of Portland, Maine
in the 19th century.
A girl of thirteen years becomes angry at some trifle
and this girl throws a stone.
A stone is thrown and this stone hits you,
Ellen Harmon, on the nose.
You fall senseless to the ground,
stunned by the blow
and never to be the same after,
the visions come.
The origin of the religion you invented and I was born into.
Because a stone was thrown.
I had a baptism but not in a river.
It is required that the water covers me but not subtle like fog
and I dread it though I know that it will happen eventually,
this submersion, to be saved. Hymns play softly with high vibrato,
the sanctuary dimmer switch is on, and in the orange light
my white robe billows as I take steps down into the tank.
I try to push the air out of the top part of my gown with my hands.
It is not cold. There are small pebble-sized weights sown into the hem
so that the gown will not fly up to the surface of the water.
Underneath I wear my underwear and a slip and once inside the tank
I am afraid of the mechanics of it but the pastor holds on to me.
Do you take the Lord as your personal savior? Then I baptize you in the name
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Whoosh.
My legs kick out from under me. Later I stand in front of the church, hair wet,
feeling close to God, holding my Certificate of Baptism and a new red Bible.
The Butcher
My great-grandfather, Otto Hartnagel, the butcher,
forbade Bible Studies in his house which was a problem
for Emma Guhl Hartnagel, my great-grandmother,
a new convert with long red hair
and the day that he forbade this he later fell down
the cellar steps and broke his leg,
a serious accident at that time requiring lots of bed rest.
Emma convinced him that this was a sign from the Devil
and so he allowed their meetings after all
though he never attended and absolutely would not convert.
And on his deathbed, according to my grandmother,
he was full of cancer from all the meat and smoking,
and when she asked him to give his heart to the Lord
he refused and told her to never bring up all that baloney again.
“We had a Holy Ghost time together.”
It is true that they were accused of holy kissing, falling to the ground,
and shouting in Maine in the 19th century at the beginning of the religion.
This is according to the Piscataquis Farmer which is devoted to politics,
agriculture, literature, morals, temperance, and news.
A witness said that the meeting appeared very irreligious,
having seen a man sit on the floor with a woman between his legs
and his arms around her. There were accusations of footwashing
between the sexes, creeping, hollering, holy kissing
even women kissing women, holy laughing, and rebaptism
but it was the no-work policy that was found most repulsive and punishable.
It is also likely that young Ellen Harmon fled the scene of the arrest
but most Adventists will deny this or they don’t know
but of course there is a web-site where the disgruntled apostate may gather
though the endnotes look suspicious, academically speaking.
Holding Hands
In the Adventist high school you are not allowed to hold hands
and the punishment for touching is called “social bound”
or “social” for short. As in: “Jill and Edmundo were placed on social
this Tuesday after being discovered in the library stairwell.
They are social bound for two weeks.”
This is how the disciplinary committee minutes would read
which means that you are not allowed to talk with or look at
or sit with each other. All of the teachers are aware after reading the minutes
faithfully and they know it was more than holding hands because
the two week punishment is severe. Except this never happened to me
probably due to my whiteness and good behavior and grades.
It is also well known that the white Bible teacher in polyester pants
is having an affair with his fifteen-year old student secretary from Guatemala
who grades papers in his tiny second floor office by the library.
The campmeeting bookstore tent is called The Book and Bible House.
I buy all the young adult books set in Africa or Latin America
where the missionaries try to shut down the witch doctor.
I look for jungle scenes on the covers and inside, young girls are possessed
with demons, tables float and candles are blown out by the Devil.
The ghost of the grandmother comes back until the girl learns how to pray
and so her family is impressed with her new powers, she falls to her knees
and the chaos ceases, so they convert, wear shoes to the new cinderblock church
where they sit on benches and sing “Jesus Loves Me” but slowly, like a dirge,
“in their traditional singing style,” according to the missionaries.
(I’ve heard the audio tapes that accompany the monthly Mission Spotlight
slide shows that always begin with the flight of a small plane over the jungle.)
At the Book and Bible House I taste the veggie meat samples, fried
in giant plug-in fry pans and at home I read that the missionaries have pet monkeys
and servants and it is always hot, though this makes the fruits large and juicy.
Life Sketches
This could be a preface for the autobiography
or the bridge of two influences.
But cohesion is not the desired,
this being an un-pulpit.
Writing grafts onto existing lives as prayer has atrophied.
Working in the space that the notebook provides,
allowing for the litany as it is long and wide.
There has always been emphasis on the sentence:
thinking and memory, constructing a grammar of togetherness,
to build, not fracture, as doors open and close.
Then, flipping gold-edged pages, the perfume wafts up as I search my Bible.
Now, how you love their prayer books, their fringes,
their lips are whispering the sacred text, and they sway across from you.
On the subway, they are Sabbath-keepers as you now are not.
Culture and Folly
Yet to be connected to something spiritual is the issue,
having left the tradition. "Pillow of no tradition."
I have written this. Search for a community,
as in the purchasing of ascension robes
and bands of like-believers gathering in fields
to await His Second Coming. They become the national joke.
And then after the 19th century there are missionaries,
a community of which you were a part as a “student missionary”
when you, for a year, went abroad as a youth
and there you contemplated culture and self, resulting in the unraveling,
leading to apostasy in your 20th century, the eighties.
You wrote every day in a missionary journal.
A choice to believe or not or what to believe in while everyone loves
to talk about culture nowadays except you are revealing yours full of folly.
Bio:
Jill is a writer and visual artist. She has an essay about handwriting, publishing, and the work of Emily Dickinson, Cecilia Vicuña, and Leslie Scalapino forthcoming in The New Review of Literature. Some of her work has also appeared in the 7th International Meeting of Visual Poetry, Aufgabe, Chain, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Boog City, The Brooklyn Rail, Pierogi Press, murmur, and Global City Review. She teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at The City College Center for Worker Education and she runs Sona Books, a community-based chapbook/special projects press and the corresponding web magazine at www.sonaweb.net. Currently, she is making small three-of-a-kind books and giving them away. You can contact Jill at jillmagi@earthlink.net.