One day
my hands will look like my mother’s—
and I wonder
if I’ll ever notice
the progression.

My daughter
will place her hand beside mine,
comparing landscapes
as though the veins and wrinkles
etched across my palms
were foreign elements,
strange and distant.

When the years
have piled high,
and I can finally say
I’ve been old
far longer than I was young,

perhaps I too
will place my hand beside
my granddaughter’s—
and study the difference
like a language
I was once fluent in.

Once I was eaten by the sea—
its waves, the hands that grabbed at me.
No air to breathe, no land for feet,
it seemed that I was all but lost:
blind and beaten, thrown and tossed.

But then I heard the sweetest sound:
my own heart’s beat—pound, pound, pound.
And up from those waves, my body rose
until my face had broken shore.

My eyes, they burned; my ears, they rung,
but that deep fear was all but gone.

Let me cry.
Let me mourn.
Let me be deeply torn—
soul ripped,
thread by thread.

I wonder how a soul bleeds.
Is it in tears?
Or does it lose its light—
dimming, dimming—
until the body holds
only a dullness
unfilled.

A hostile rumbling
growls from the deep—
den where it sleeps,
waiting.

Slowly,
patiently,
ready
to emerge-
Like me.

Your silver voice,
slick as a fish,
I’d gut,
dice,
and toss
to the sharks.

Velvet and hypnotic,
you sweet-talk your way
through our minds—
slipping past our conscience
and every blaring red flag,
entangling us
in pleasant submission.

I’m desperate
to erase
every trace of you.

My Bible is heavy now.
Not in its size,
But the burden of your words
Scratched between each line.

I used to trace these pages
And find light and wonder—
But now I wonder
How easily I believed
The stories told to me.

Now I flinch at familiar lines
And the most common of quotations—
Rearranged,
Deeply mistaken.

You made excuse after excuse,
Twisting blessings into bruises.
You carved loopholes into love,
Called cruelty a “calling,”
Named silence “submission.”

The simplicity of the Gospel
Was lost in your justifications—
Layered with anecdotes,
Disturbed by additions.

You rewrote the margins
With authority you were never given.
You added shame to grace,
And control to the cross,
As if Christ bled for your power.

Now I read with trembling,
Every verse a battlefield with arrows drawn—
A war between your stretched theology
And a fragile hope
That I will still hear
A sacred voice
In all this violence.