Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking

By C. T. Salazar

In Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, C. T. Salazar crafts a personal mythology of biblical proportions (“I keep imagining God / as having the brass claw feet / of my mother’s tub”), with Mississippi as the rural backdrop. “Barnburner” opens:

The barn doesn’t love you, though over and over you enter
its wide mouth like Jonah passing back and forth through the
     fish

Through sonnets, contrapuntal poems, and expertly executed line breaks, Salazar reimagines sacred imagery (“heaven: clouds marigolding softly”) as well as perceptions of color and scale, as in the poem “Shades of Red”:

red giant          red blood cell see the difference
is not carbon just its patience             the question
turns from brick red     what have you been building 
to rust red       how long have your been building it

There are roughly 40 mentions of stars shining through Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, but this cosmic focus is constantly being reinvented. In “Poem Ending with Abraham’s Suffering,” we are instructed to “[l]et the starlight harden // to keys in your hands,” and in “Sonnet for the Barbed Wire Wrapped Around This Book,” we observe:

+ on my arms these torn constellations 
made me heaven + my chest of bright stars

But stars can also be a metaphor, for “the black // beetles in your yard crawling around hurriedly / like pieces of a star trying to reassemble itself.” Elsewhere, stars come to life: 

easy as the atmosphere spending 
its sweet time on us, even with so many 

stars bumping their foreheads against the glass. […]

In these poems the Bible is not merely transposed into our modern life but is also a framework for a new and urgent awareness of faith, where faith is not what you believe but a way of reading the world. In addition to stars, threaded through these poems are clouds, fish, barns, and even a meditation on heaviness. What emerges is an understanding of the physical world as a living being full of spirit:

The boat named God remains unfound,
but there’s a small fish trapped inside it, 
a blue one, like a heart thirty times too small.