Sin Offering
Leviticus 12:1–7
Sand scorches my feet
like ashes,
a forgotten fire.
Sun on my face
welcomes me back
from eighty dark days
to witness bloody horns,
spatters of careful slaughter,
a pool of blood sliding across the sand
black and sticky, like my own,
but sprinkled on a holy altar,
consecrated.
If I could step inside,
stroke the wide cloth
brown with years of sin,
write my name
with my own
human redness,
would it be clean
as that bird,
that lamb?
Sudden stirring at my breast—
under thick folds, my child wakes
in sweat, and her hoarse cry
echoes across the desert
like a great shadow,
like distant water.
A native of the South, Elizabeth Cranford teaches composition and literature at a junior college in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her BA in humanities from BYU (which she loved!) and an MA in English literature from a little town in southern Georgia where football is king (which she couldn’t care less about). She is passionate about the gospel, eating good food without guilt, finding humor in most situations, and convincing young women that being thirty and single is not the end of the world.
