Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Elizabeth Robinson! Celebrate by reading “Rift,” which we published in 2024! And then read Robinson’s “Soft Eclipse,” which we published in 2020 and also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Finally, read “Wear Away” and “Lost Gospel,” two Robinson poems we published in 2021!

Rift

“Belief or no belief?”
the body asks the human.

“Belief,” says the human, stepping
into the body. A lie.

Ah, but the body so creamy
and sweet on the tongue

of the human. “My body,
mine.” A lie.

God furnishes belief
as a glistening oil that lines
the body as the human

enters it. God is golden
and aromatic. God

is a lubricant. Unbelief,
made of a very fine abrasive,

sands down the interior
of the body

to make way
for the rich bed of falsehoods
that grow

the body to
superhuman strength.

Here is what a prophet is.
A human in a body

of unbelief who has
been rubbed raw.

Here is what God is.
Estranged from belief.

Belief, for the time being,
irrelevant. A little residue

coating the back of the
throat. What is that flavor?

The body, when it first
gets up from

its bed of creed
(unbelief or belief),

is clumsy and disoriented.

Was there a human in me?
Was I anointed with golden oil?

Why is my tongue so dry and bitter?

Each morning, all the parties
discard their dreams and

reconvene for mediation.

Would that the body
were more than a passive

recipient. It would say:

The tongue is a glove.
Rift is a gold oil parting

a dead sea.

Meanwhile, the head
was always without

its crown of skull so that
the human could be poured

in. Now unbelief glows from
the opening, a facsimile halo.

And bone, with its thousand,
thousand joints and pieces

now slicked with God’s oil
which hardens into resin,

into amber, fossilizing,
permanently sealing

the rift between container
and contained.

And belief

holds a tide so
concentrated that

its surge accosts
the fused bones

and breaks through
God’s fontanelle.

(Image: Richard Serra’s Rift #4, 2011)