HALF-PRIEST
I fled the house party
ashamed of broken rules,
of having done nothing really
but welcome teens to a fire.
Drove north to the lake.
Hit a deer before the last turn,
watched it hobble into darkness.
Rowed out weeping.
Spelled out a years-long calling
to priesthood.
while halting words said good.
Burnt hands tested themselves
on my smoldering, shaking shoulders.
The bishop’s spare office
a cave of whispers
adjoined the gold-flaked cathedral.
Have you been in a mature relationship?
Have you ever been in love?
It was a chance to say no
and I breathed it in.
Exhaled university.
Barely made it through
(and all that entails).
And here I am now,
praying still, though in verse,
to gods I can see
who reach up from the earth,
who gaze up through river mirrors.
STILL LIFE: THREE DEAD BIRDS - WILLELM VAN AELST
"In Heaven, everything is fine."
-David Lynch
You there, quiet in your heap.
Too small, all, to be a meal.
Too drab for decoration.
Too common
for the fly fisherman and his rod.
Did you end yourselves for this moment?
Or did it come for you sideways
to make you into something new?
Bio: Logan Garner
My name is Logan Garner. I am a poet from Oregon’s north coast and a lifelong rural dweller. Raised in an Indiana farm town by a devout Catholic family, I spent the first half of my life steeped in religion and ritual, always with an eye toward what I was supposed to do, supposed to say, ultimately shaping me into a people-pleaser (and eventually, blessedly, a black sheep).
As a boy I fell deeply in love with ritual and even found myself on a path to the priesthood before eschewing it for university. It took me years to realize that the drive to conform—to be accepted and to be seen as good or worthy—was, more than anything, a fear response. Two decades of “adult” life (I am now 40) to truly distinguish between those values and priorities placed on me from those which are genuinely my own.
The upshot? This would-be priest moved away from the church and away from the Midwest to search for self. I found myself entering a different kind of priesthood[1], I suppose, into a life of writing, wonder and contemplation through poetry. I now happily reside outside the culture and expectations of my upbringing and live a simple and quiet life in a cottage in the country (I am a “radical hippy-poet” to my friends in the writing community here).
My background and my separation from the circumstances and sensibilities of my youth has profoundly impacted my work. Ironically, my poems are steeped in the language of ritual, religion, except that the holy and sacred for me now are rooted in the more-than-human world and in the complexity, joy and pain of personal relationships. Above all, my poetry is focused on the sacred nature of the moment[2]. Any belief system I can profess to have is one of humanism and radical acceptance.
[1] Half-Priest
[2] Still Life: Three Dead Birds - Willelm Van Aelst