you sat above me, and i watched a song unfurl on your skin.
from your tongue, a pieta tumbled unto my knees.
i was cradling the mother mary who was weeping over the desecrated, emancipated body of her own, over the body of jesus.

the eucharist, the son and father and the holy fantasy of christ, it’s eyes bore heaven onto my shoulders.
a dead woman was burning and her son and grandson and great-grandchild cried underneath a divine weight.
her ashes were split among the men.
they took them home and placed them silently on the shelves while i watched and shivered, silent.
and with my quiet tears, jesus appeared in the crucifixes hanging ‘round all the ladies necks.
he looked at me, with red flowing from his crown of nails.
he looked at me, with the stained agony mary shared when she saw her young son.
he fell into my hands.
i was cradling the dying body of jesus.

i was looking at him as an old man, pained and continuously bleeding.
i was looking at him as a child, playing with sticks on the feet of god.
i was looking at him as the carpenter and as the infant; sweating or crying.
dying or surviving.
i was looking at him through my muddy memory,
through my grandmother’s wrinkled eyes.
i didn’t know know if he would love me like this,
as an open wound,
and infected and rotting and selfish thing,
and,
i wept.