Arch City
A Hymn To You Before I Met You
St. Louis, arch-browed ironic city, you break my heart.
You’re all Creve Coeur, right from the start.
Sometimes, you’re all Archbishop collars, and then
You’re just people begging dollars on your streets.
St. Louis, you break my heart. We just cannot, so
I will start talking to you, but you already broke my heart.
Just today, I saw a woman with an autistic son on my block.
Some good soul had given him a small chocolate milk. Maybe
it was silk for his tiny little mouth. I hope so. I hope so.
His mother, I know, had an ongoing flirtation with death.
You can call it opioids. You might pronounce it crystal meth.
She only wanted—and wouldn’t you—just to feed her kid.
I saw this slow dance unfolding, and I offered her food. She
declined, but she gripped my hand. “Blessings,” we said at
the same time. She said to me, “Thank you for seeing us.”
I did not know whether to wash or preserve my hand, the
Stigmata of her touch. The hand of a stranger burned that much.
A Hymn To You Before I Met You
I did not know your college placed
you on chapel probation. I did not
know you had a magenta stripe in
your hair, or a College Democrats
poster on your door. Now I know
why you were on chapel probation.
You just cannot behave yourself.
You are all the Hullabaloo of mischief
your teachers ascribed to you. I knew
this when you told me, and that you
sat in the pew, with three ear-rings,
a surly glance at God, and you chewed
your gum, and popped it, too. I think
God should pop, airily colored, like you.
Pamela Sumners is a constitutional and civil rights lawyer whose special interest in church/state cases has led her to glare across courtrooms at Roy Moore, Jay Sekulow, Bill Pryor, and Alabama governors who deny that the Bill of Rights applies to Alabama. She has only recently begun submitting her work, which has appeared in or been recognized by about 20 publishers and journals, including Gival Press (Oscar Wilde finalist), Streetlight (third place in 2018 contest), Woven Tail Press (third place in 2018 contest), Tahoma Review, California Quarterly, Mudlark, Snakeskin, BACOPA, and Blue Unicorn. She carefully reads all Contributors' Notes and has discovered that others write for lofty purposes. She freely admits to purely selfish reasons: she simply can't allow any writing implement to remain static and unused. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, she now lives in St. Louis with her wife, teenage son, and three bloated rescue dogs who think sunglasses are a food group.
