In the Beginning
by Kelly Sawin
In the beginning, God made a garden.
There, he made a man and he made a woman.
There is much to be said about this. About
the way the earth was watered by mist
and there was no rain yet. The cool of day
a sparkling dew rising around knees
and sparking on skin—the only cover
over muscle and heat and heart. The way
a wife fit so neatly against the side
of her husband with his arm around her,
rib that she was. Warm and sturdy and close
to the heart of things. Where God made
things like gingerroot with its earthy weight
in the palm, spread lemon balm to calm
a mother’s nerves. Only, there was no
unnerve then. More likely dropped,
then, later like manna, tucked in
the landscape like ore in a mine. How
jewelweed is arranged by streams of
poison ivy, a clever mercy. Nothing
ephemeral then—no winter to coax
the newborn head of a flower from snow
with a whisper of redemption, promise kept
in the vibrating life of the underground root.
Nettles not lacquered with stings, mosquitoes
not leaving welts. . . Consider the holly bush:
its leaves restless to be smooth. Only
near a deer or squirrel or some such beast
does it twist itself to a spindle’s horrid
prick. We fall asleep. Creation sleeps
and grinds its teeth, groaning to birth
the briers shot through Eden. Like a fairy tale.
We ask, God, give us this day a description
of how things were supposed to be. No,
that’s not right. It’s give us this day our daily
bread. And that is the description of how
things were supposed to be. Evil enough, now,
for the day. Hunger enough. We ate the fruit,
bit into it with our chests cut through with Hell’s
heat and thinking we might be able to hide
the act the way a drunk shoves bottles
beneath the mattress. All things come to light,
in the end. We sank our teeth into flesh and knew this.
Kelly Sawin's work has appeared in Ekstasis Magazine, The Windhover, River Teeth: Beautiful Things, the Appalachian Review, Susurrus, the Virginia Literary Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in the 2024 National Poetry Series, and a semifinalist in the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry and in the 2024 Orison Poetry Prize. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with her husband and three small children.
