I come to you in all seriousness, reverent as a turtleneck—I am graceless but I am not depraved. I went to synagogues for a year because I had lost God and was trying to find Him, following clues with my comically oversized magnifying glass held up to my giant eye, lashes collapsing like jaws, grilling congregants under the naked lightbulb of my longing. I kept just missing him. He went thataway. Maybe I wanted to be Jewish to be done with Jesus but not yet break up with God, as if moving into the guest room but leaving my clothes in the other closet, that version of myself a hallway away. I am the ghost of the house I live in— old me-phantoms surround, fuck around with the furniture, make all the mirrors tell the truth. One night I have a dream my husband leaves and the nightmare part is that I’m relieved and so I finally see who I am. It’s not that I got used to loneliness, only that it was too late to learn anything else. The first time a man touched me it was to lower me into the water and raise me out, new fish, the sin picked clean. I was saved, as if I could be spent—saved, I saved myself for God, or if not God then a man God sent, posing us toward each other in a desert diorama, His Holy Homework, but the first two boys I loved are dead, so at night I give myself to them, unzip the hollows, usher them into the pitch. The books inside me are blank. I birth the boys as my son, whom I love and whom I try to forgive.
Erin,
This is a great poem! I enjoyed it a lot
David Fox
Editor, The Poet’s Art
171 Silverleaf Lane
Islandia, NY 11749