I go to the stone lions, lean my head against their solid, immovable weight. I tell them the things one might tell a friend–stretches of fatigue and loneliness, grim sorties in search of solace in strange and blasted places, words for anger, stones for real
Children who cry out
Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes
In the name of the Lord!
-Luke 19:40
They don’t tell you that solitude can be a weapon, a way of making a body feel it must just be me when there were signs all along that
The contest was never what it seemed to be
Resembling a stock show more than a beauty contest
Told to line up
The hand-picked female handler writes numbers in permanent marker
on our haunches
And maybe don’t question too much what the girl in the high heels, glitter, push-up top
Is doing giving free twerking lessons
To doe-eyed coeds
And a heifer like me
Careful to keep my cloven hooves
And rising ire
Under wraps
I see the child, backlit by this extraordinary light, and because I lost you I know the kind of pain
Can come with a picture when the child is gone
I will always
Love you, child
No matter how Minotaur you make me
In this labyrinth
I have learned to
call home
The smallish courtroom in the smallish building in the smallish town near the coast. I used to say the armpit of Texas and that is when I liked the place where the d.a. joked in juvenile court about the time his underlings ribbed him for his inadvertently possessed marijuana plant
I
I carry around the iterations of the Baptist pastor, the university president, the camp cook, the college preacher, the old friend, missionary doctor, adoptive cohort, biological aunts, uncles, cousins
Immediate family
With fear in their eyes because I
I
Told the story
About everything except the day they adjudicated Charles
My subjunctive regret
Had I been present in the smallish courtroom in the smallish building with the smallish judge
Would they still have been able to
Lie for him?
Let him off so Scott-free
Smallish voice says over and over
I should have been there.
That day.
After years of not getting it
I finally do–
You dip the ravaging
Insect into
The viscous sweet
“Honey,”
He says
“This is how you make the unpalatable work.”
–Luke 7:18-24
Sometimes I do
Visit me from the past
Thinner then and younger looking
her voice so earnest
I love her
Want to tell her
That I am lighter now, buoyant,
As the truth does
Set us free
The call costs five cents a minute and you have to be ready with a form of payment. On the other end of the line there is
A princess stuck in a well
Bears curled in around a wee-sleepy home invader
A girl in a badly blended family with a knack for the most inconvenient footwear
And all the rest of us-
sleeping beauties, garden-of-Gethsemane-tired
Of hearing about
This impending crucifixion.
The day that Miracle died we walked in the mountains. Two bears walked ahead of us and their presence seemed ordained, magical.
It was magical I tell myself even though she died.
Sometimes I feel like I am out of mantras, out of coins for the machine, no longer capable of telling myself to believe it will all be ok.
Then Casey Hathaway tells us all about the bear who kept him company in the woods we have all got lost in and
I go there to find Him too, lean into his ursine chest, sob a little.
Believe He is real, despite the feat in our eyes.
It is a note on my phone, metonymy for bottomless loss, I call her name every day, aware that lost causes are lost causes are lost causes
How will we ever heal?
How will we be whole again?
I would ask the boy on the other side of the over-priced desk
If I had the heart to keep
Picking my battles
The LA Times writes a puff piece on abortion doctors who travel to states like mine to kill the unborn.
Our Eichmanns
Our Holocaust.
Matthew 2:18 NIV
[18] “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”
Carrying Light 