The Transformation by John C. Mannone

        This is my blood of the New Covenant,
        which is shed for many.
        —Mark 14:24

I hold the wine in fragile crystal
        till each facet mirrors the cathedral sky

and catches shimmers of stars

        perched on candelabra clouds.

Prayers rain on the sacred liquid,
    each drop, each pulse, I feel

through my tender fingers. I see
    the rafters as cruciform beams

anchored in glass glistening like
    a moonlight-swished burgundy sea.

The image is shaken to glimmers, broken
    by concentric waves from the ebb

of my own heart. It diminishes me.
    Yet I am filled in spaces between the flood.

He touches me

    through those reflections,
    through the torn veil

of liquid transformed to blood,
    His tears mixing with mine.

John C. Mannone has poems accepted in North Dakota Quarterly, the 2020 Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, Foreign Literary Review, The Menteur, Blue Fifth Review, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. His won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest in poetry (2020) and the Carol Oen Memorial Fiction Prize (2020). He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His latest collection, Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love, and Poetry, is forthcoming from Linnet’s Wings Press (2020). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. A retired physics professor, he lives near Knoxville, Tennessee. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com