When my friends & I
down the last of mother’s bottle
on the kitchen floor—
when I peel a sundress husk
& strip down to linen, exposed like Eve,
I do not believe there is a God
who I am sinning under. Though
I wish I did, sometimes—&
that I could trickle blood
into His palm, &
that the hand gripping scissors
unsheathed from night in the bathroom
would be the same which scurries,
spider-like through my mind while
I am numb on the operating table,
the same knuckles that curl
around a pocket knife &
brand my chest another drowned,
settling like layered pebbles,
corpses in the muck,
watching gopherwood ripple
like tawny silk on the rising film—
less deserving than the squirrels
making wreaths with their tails
around the mast.
