Virgins
Cleveland Museum of Art, after Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth,”
Cavernous, I wander the marbled streets of Cleveland.
Here, in a bright room within rooms
I find my myriad selves, my many relic hearts.
Some of my bodies are in green, endless fields.
Some of my bodies are naked, eating immortalized fruits
while others recline in oil, backlit darkness.
Before this, I held my mother’s heart like a fruit.
Hungry for love that took me years to name,
I bit into life,
took part of hers with me. My sin:
I ate, and made my love of women known.
Ours is a world of punishment and risk.
And to love, as I love—the steel of women
the tender of only the most excellent of men—
is to risk the wrath of men still, the wrath of my mother’s
god, who sits on high and knows all hearts.
Christ and the Virgin in the house at Nazareth look on
while the people pass by, their sneakers squeaking like mice.
The fertility clinic in my phone tells me I have seven years left
to freeze my future, seven years to hem the risk
I incur as the wife of somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son.
High on the wall the two virgins—one mother, one Christ child
with the face of a girl—work and needle their mending,
their holy books splayed open, their laundry crumpled like love.
It’s not the queerness of Christ that holds me, or Mary’s tears,
but her weariness: This child will be the death of me..
Like a dutiful daughter, Jesus braids a crown of thorns
while Mary contemplates her life’s continuing labor.
They cling to their Heavenly Father the only way they know.
As I sit below, statued, blood gathers beneath my waist.
A relief? A failure?
In moments of grief, in moments like this,
I hear my mother’s echoing reproach:
When you have your own one day, you’ll understand.
What Victoria’s Secret Taught Me About God
Now I can say what the soft cotton already knew,
thin fabric shielding the brown eyes of my chest. Flat and unsearching.
Its laced elastic ruffle hugging my small ribs, tight as a life jacket.
Back then, I could look at myself with an owl’s unchecked dispassion,
not a curve to be seen or felt, though hours before I’d touched
the catalog’s gloss, the paper loud and dangerous. Sweet
as stolen candy. Even then I feared being caught
peering at the crests and crowns of all those women, their eyes
fixed beyond at someone else—some guy perhaps, stupid enough
to think the show was just for him. How rare since then,
that flash and spark of terror. How zealous the blaze.
How could it have ever been possible, to scorn a God who
I know, had made me too, even with all this artifice. Who heard my tender,
wordless praise in secret. A flower garden planted before the winter.
Sodom and Gomorrah
Believers promenade in the parking lot
of the House of God. Fendi bags and flip-
flops, Mustangs and Marlboro spliffs ash
beyond the sightline of a great cloud of witnesses.
For now, like honeycomb, the doors gape open.
Children gurgle with bliss. Couples hold hands and scowl.
Stragglers and teens congregate on the shelf, balconied
like clipped doves while ushers buzz to their stations.
In the bathroom, the good one far from the front entrance,
a girl on her knees thanks every god, throws
her piss-soaked offering into the expectant basket.
And the queers and fags and dykes expend themselves,
coursing through the body of Christ like blood.
Backstage, the pastor basks in first service
afterglow—instructs the choir, band, worship leader
to really ramp it up this time. Make the Spirit move
and everyone under the lights knows what he means.
Today’s sermon is about The End. The world cleansed
by fire, the Rapture coming for the faithful.
Everyone is asked if they’re ready, and no one
is asked if they’re ready for what the end will mean.
After Reading Li-Young Lee, I Contemplate
three flies, trailing each other like questions.
And the evening
ahead, a dark bud.
No one knows the fragrance of loneliness like a prophet
or a pastor’s kid at the bottom
of her glass, wine-round and shimmering.
As I write this, the ocean envelopes a column of fire
the color of Satan’s eye.
Every day, I threaten to walk into the sea.
And a rich man and his friends threaten
to launch themselves into the clenched hole
of our galaxy.
Goodbye, Elon. Farewell, Jeff.
The astounding probability of never returning
has never occurred to you. And it has never occurred
to me, searching as I do for the nearest body
of water. There is no sea
close enough for me to enter. Even fewer deep enough.
A handsome man driving the blue truck of my country
approaches me on the porch, where the flies are. Plastic
package in hand, bubbled and happy, he asks if I am Danielle?
Oh to be a Danielle—all brains, and ambition, and legs—
an executive at KeyBank with a highrise loft in the city,
Louboutins for day shoes, two Teslas, and no debt.
Or another Danielle, a personal trainer—all biceps and chest,
cut from the gods—the kind Danielle #1 would fuck
on the side. He asks if I am Danielle.
And though nothing in me desires him,
(not my thighs, not my final frontier)
I almost cry Yes! Yes! I am she! just to see his face
glow luminous, having named one of my many names.
And the arrowed smiles scattered on the package,
cut like the faces of clowns, tell me
it’s only the imminent truth that counts,
the thrill of requesting and receiving.
I deny him my true name but gift him my mouth, pulled wide.
My own sweat—renewable, pearled, crawls without destination.
Imagine! In all of this, like a child, I still desire to please.
This is my new millennium. No one today has died
yet. Like anything here could.
At the End of the Empire
like the child
who knowing
nothing
but the tyranny
of her need
in the pitch
of the long night
bellows
for the arms
that always find
her despite
the wait
I reach for you
Psalm 23 As The Temperance Card
All my readings come like this: pulled
from earth like plumeless thistles
scattered down the sun-seared highway.
The lengths I’ve gone to find you,
Lord, would have me stoned in one life,
burned the next. In this one you have suffered
me to live, a little longer, harder, wilder
than my enemies. You send your angel to me
once again—their face a flash, a woman’s and
a man’s—wings flayed and spread like meat
in open air, hair wreathed in white-
hot coronation. And I, already gazing
out beyond, am led to lie down here in fields of green,
to simply be. O Inconvenient Lord, unsheath
my sword and let me do the thing I know.
Or look to me as one continuous blade.
Tell the angel I’ll be wasted here,
these cups in either hand bright and brimmed
and running over. Give this reprieve
to someone more deserving
of such opulence, opulence—opulent God!
You cause my heart to burst. I always want;
I lust and thirst and there’s no end to it.
O stubborn Lord, the woman I must be
on land, by flowing water, and in need
knows only this: her body’s tempered
swing, the brandish of her flesh.
If I must rest in such a place as here, then lay me down
between the dirt road and the river.
Beside this flowering of yellow iris, make me.
