Glen Hunting
after Anne Sexton’s “With Mercy for the Greedy”
You are in the art, in the work, in the product— but what if the masterful imprints are masking a fallen angel instead? Forgive us, Father (or Mother, or Whomever): we don’t realise what we’re doing, or else our resolve makes our bread that much harder to swallow. Talent won’t sanctify sorrow if You won’t appear, or at least observe from afar—it will only make suffering less banal with pretty displays, like funeral wreaths. It’s been said that You are the path to follow, but how can I re-route the one-way street of myself to be sourced from You, too? This is the time I should come to accept that a spiritual earpiece left untuned will sorrow the mouth with a serpent’s tongue: testing the air for my cue to surrender, hoping the craft can counterfeit grace while walled in a withering garden.
Glen Hunting is a writer from Perth, Western Australia (Whadjuk Noongar boodja), now living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). He won the 2019 Zip Print Short Story Award and the 2022 NT Writers Festival Writing Competition. His poetry has been published in Plumwood Mountain Journal, Meniscus, Burrow, Portside Review, and elsewhere. He works for a service provider on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yangkunytjatjara (APY) Lands.
Old Water Rat Publishing 