Transubstantiation ¹
by Molly McCully Brown
 

It’s the middle of the night. I’m just a little loose on beer,
and blues,
and battered air, and all the ways this nowhere looks like home:
the fields and boarded houses dead with summer, the filling 
station ² rowdy
with the rumor of another place. Cattle pace the distance 
between road
and gloaming, inexplicably awake. And then, the bathtubs 
littered in the pasture,
for sale or salvage ³ , or some secret labor stranger than I know. 
How does it work,
again, the alchemy ⁴ that shapes them briefly into boats, and then 
the bones
of great felled ⁵ beasts, and once more into keening ⁶ copper bells, 
before
I even blink? Half a mile out, the city builds back up along the 
margin.
Country songs cut in and out of static on the radio. Lord, most of 
what I love
mistakes itself for nothing.

Credit: “Transubstantiation” from The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics And Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown. Copyright © 2017 by Molly McCully Brown. Used by permission of Persea Books, Inc (New York), www.perseabooks.com. All rights reserved.

• 1Transubstantiation: theological concept within Roman Catholicism describing the change that occurs during the sacrament of the Eucharist, where the bread and wine used in the sacrament are believed to become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
• 2Filling station: gas station.
• 3Salvage:  rescue, restore.
• 4Alchemy: medieval practice of attempting to transform metal into gold; transmutation.
• 5Felled: knock down.
• 6Keening: high-pitched sound, often related to the expression of grief or sorrow.

Use the See Hear, Feel Connection Questions handout to help students analyze this text.