• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Erin Adair-Hodges: “The Last Judgement”

May 9, 2018 by PBQ 1 Comment

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. 

Filed Under: Issue 97

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. David Fox says

    June 28, 2018 at 7:21 pm

    Erin,
    This is a great poem! I enjoyed it a lot
    David Fox
    Editor, The Poet’s Art
    171 Silverleaf Lane
    Islandia, NY 11749

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ March Slam Session!

PBQ @ the Pen & Pencil!

PBQ Slam Session!

Slam Session with PBQ!

PBQ @ Poetry Tent!

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org