by Logan Garner

The diocese paid for my pilgrimage
to Rome and to Umbrian monasteries.
Barely eighteen, I breathed fervor.
Wept and sweated in crypts
despite the cold. Prayed
around rosary beads above Assisi
in a mountain cave. The priest
with me thought I’d fallen asleep,
shuffled off for his own quiet walk.

In Norcia there were boars’ heads
above every doorway,
or so it seemed. They were
suspended bodiless, jaws agape
and snarling, begging
for a monk’s breakfast of
coffee, apples, bread and butter.
I stood beneath one
opened my mouth
and breathed a prayer,
the heat dew on my skin.

I am whiskered now,
like a boar,
bristling grays coming on.
Like them I am bereft
of that notion of prayer.
As they went silent
so have I gone
from hymns and chants.
Yet
I am not deadened.

Mystery, sits with me
here on forest paths marked
equally by footworn compaction
as by the parasitized mushrooms
growing on their edges,
dense-fleshed and orange as lobsters,
whose flesh go to beetles
and pill bugs, whose flesh in turn
go to the rough-skinned newt.

Here, between compulsive waves
and the squatting coast range;
where marine layer fog
blankets all, a daily myrrh
shrouds the land in questions.
My prayer is a wild red huckleberry—
it cannot be cultivated,
yet it springs forth from entropy
into impossible multitudes.

Logan Garner is a nature-centered poet and essayist from Oregon’s north coast. Winner of the 2023 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize and one of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 poets (2024), his work has been featured in Orca Literary Journal, The Elevation Review, The Salal Review, Flying Island and others. He is the author of collections Here, in the Floodplain (Plan B Press, 2023) and The Sin of Feeding Wild Birds (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). Logan can be found on both Instagram and Bluesky @logangarnerpoetry.