I can hear my mother calling
through the cracks of the door,
her own hands split,
bleach bottles leaning up against  
crinkled wallpaper.

“What are you doing in there?”
gets distorted by the freshwater sea
I have created,
bubbles escaping from my mouth
relaying
“baptism."

But my mother does not invite her friends
or clutch the camera
hanging around her neck like it could choke her
nervously,
and I do not feel the wave of
divinity wash over me,
cleanse me of the sin of birth.

But, instead, I tilt my head
beneath the faucet,
and water settles on my cheekbones and
across my bare stomach and
clings to my hair, curling itself like
Velcro to my matted locks,
and it weighs me down
like a liquid stigmata.
Like a conscious sponge, I feel the
pressure and lapse further and further,
clutching the edges of the bathtub,
the womb of my mother,
the weight of the red sea, once parted,
sifting through my hair and along my wrists,
following more of a path than I
can find.

“What are you doing?”
repeats my mother
as her bleeding limbs
cup me out of the water.
No one claps, hands my mother
a bible.
She does not smile when dusty,
cracked pews flood and cleanse with water.

Born again—
that’s just it:
I never knew life
in the first place.