The Significance of Blueberries in Divine Election

If I did start a cult, we could all eat blueberry jam on warm cat head biscuits...

The Significance of Blueberries in Divine Election

Fixing toast on a Sunday morning,
I notice the last bit of blueberry preserves
smear into a Rorschach Christ.

A black-and-white inkblot Jesus used to hang
on the yellow refrigerator of my childhood.
I stared for hours, willing the shadow swirls
to give up the ghost of Christ, but He hid
in the mystery of monochrome.

My brother said I was a fake Christian.
I lied, pretended to see,
only Jesus and I, the wiser.

As miracles go, a jam jar Christ seems insignificant,
but here we are, you reading these words,
and me divining some historical divinity
from a bit of fruit, pectin, and sugar,

I don’t know where this poem is going,
so I’ll reserve these last few lines to speak
to the kid who couldn’t find Jesus:

Watch water drops race up the station wagon windshield.
Count the colors on the back of the box turtle.
Fight when you have to, and walk away when you can.
One day you will find yourself at the end of this poem.

image by Matt Layne

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Matt Layne writes…

I've been thinking about those inkblot images of Jesus from the 70s, and all those water-stain images of Christ and Mary from the 80s and 90s. A little ways down the road from here in Sterrett, Alabama, we have a community that cropped up based around a teenager's visions of Mary in Croatia in the 1980s, and now there's a fella up in Warrior, Alabama who claims to have been to heaven multiple times. I kid you not; he says God is encased in a gelatinous cube. His church is growing, y'all. For the record, I saw my jam jar Jesus first. Not that it's a competition, or heaven forbid, that I want to start a cult, but if it were a competition, I'd win, and if I did start a cult, we could all eat blueberry jam on warm cat head biscuits every Sunday (after saying grace, of course). Wherever you find yourself today, I hope you grant yourself a whole lot of grace and even more sweetness. 

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“The Significance of Blueberries in Divine Election” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022.

Miracle Strip, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a unique hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an end-stop embellishment QR code which, when scanned, transforms the reader into a listener. Layne has recorded each poem, often with the accompaniment of musician and poet, Ned Mudd. The first line of the book invites the reader to “tell me your story, and I will tell you mine,” in the campfire tradition. In Miracle Strip, the reader and poet embark on an experiential journey of memories and the ghosts who haunt us. 

Miracle Strip by Matt Layne is now in print! Get your copy today!

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Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. A founding member of the 1990s improvisational poetry collective, The Kevorkian Skull poets, Layne believes in the radical transformative power found in the intersection of poetry and art, and he wants you to write your truth and share it out loud. A multiple Hackney Award winning writer, he has also been recognized by the National Society of Arts and Letters and been featured in Peek Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal, Steel Toe Review, B-Metro, and elsewhere. Look for him at your local library.

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