Next Line, Please: It Was I [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week on Next Line, Please contributors laid out false confessions on a surprisingly eclectic mix of topics. Charise Hoge’s “Shooting for the Moon” wins the "sonority prize" for the run of rhymes that energizes it:

They handed me a gun
—dusk, as it happened,
moon misbegotten on
my glass-top table. Sullen,
I aimed—not pointing at anyone,
not blaming the run
of Furies, not looking to shun
repercussions of a percussive gun.
Shards surround, leaves abun-
dant fever the ground. It’s autumn.
I’m mad for a glow minus reflection.

Some NLP regulars suggested that the writer cut the first line. David voted to retain it, and Keith Barrett and Emily Winakur, suggested that the opening two lines be flipped. What do you think?

Donald LaBranche's “But Now,” contains a parochial school recollection that takes quite a turn:

St. Teresa’s parish, late 1950’s. The church is impenetrable, aloof,
a single candle for light. It is the week of our First Communion.
The Sisters have marched us in, shoulder-to-shoulder, index fingers

at our lips, to rehearse the good confession before Saturday. They are legion.
“Here is the door to the confessional. Here is the kneeler. The screen.”
Here is the story we must hear: “She was in a class before you and sat

where you are sitting now.” (They are a well-practiced Greek chorus.)
“She contrived made-up sins, was unrepentant, laughed at the sacrament,
hoped to fool the priest. The Devil was not fooled. When she took the host

during Mass, the Devil had her by the throat and choked the lie out of her.
Her parents wept, and she was buried in unhallowed ground, lost forever.”
We had not known that we were naked, nor that we should have been afraid.

Inspired by the great man of confessions himself, Patricia Wallace's “Augustine Confesses” has an immutable claim over our attention:

Theft thrilled me. Not the despised pears
but ripeness and excess. I loved
my own undoing, my errors, my shame.
My liberty was that of a runaway, my sexual habits
at a skillet’s center, outrageous desires
hissing around me. Unreasonably attached
to the pleasure of mortal bodies, I fused
with one I never name. So deeply engrafted.
When she was torn from me, my maimed heart
limped along a trail of blood. Then came longing
for immutable light, my soul laddering higher
and higher, through all the degrees of matter,
through the heavenly spheres: the eternity
beyond time itself. Breathless, that moment
of brushing lightly as skin against it

Patricia, in the spirit of the prompt, also confesses to stealing most of the language for this from Augustine’s Confessions, for a result which is “not necessarily true to Augustine’s argument,” a remark that may spur you to return to the source, or wonder at the remarkable action of taking things out of context.

To read more "confessional" poems, and to check out Dr. Lehman's own own effort, “Lazy Day,” which capitalizes on the homophonic les idées (“the ideas”) in French, visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!