Picaroon Poetry - Issue #17 - July 2019

Beth Bayley
Communion
The Novena Catholic Church has been rebuilt and made grand enough to
accommodate nearly everyone’s Sunday morning, though at Christmas they
needed a tent outside and a video screen for overflow. We could see it from the
bar across the street, where they know us well (a phenomenon I’m ambivalent
about), as we had our communion of lager and thin, crispy pizza.
So Sunday’s crowded, but Wednesday is, too, and sometimes even the lunchtime
throngs head in for a Jesus fix. That’s when I usually see her, at the bottom of the
church steps, with a dowager’s hump under her floral blouse and the brightest
magenta lipstick on her wrinkled mouth. You aren’t allowed to beg in Singapore,
but you are allowed to sell packets of tissues, three for a dollar, and she holds
three yellow packets in her left hand. Sometimes there’s an uncle in a wheelchair
selling them too, one leg a stump that the crowds have to walk around; but it’s her
I go to with my coins, her lipstick a beacon and beckoning.
I blot my own lipstick with her tissues later, as I get ready to go to the bar, leaning
into the mirror to examine my own wrinkles, empty riverbeds, dry tributaries seen
from space.
23