Erin Adair-Hodges: “The Last Judgement”

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.