Britney

Good Friday coincides with my father’s birthday like an eclipse and I forget to say anything to him even though my instincts want me to write to him. When I wake up the next day, my cousin reminds me and I remember that he did not wish me one on my 16th birthday. I feel worse than I did before.

My head feels like a mine, every ounce of energy a pick in its rubble, but I cannot see the men whose hands I’m at the mercy of. Problem after problem. Like minor fables they accumulate, until my anthology is thick enough to meet the soles of God. I look to the rose and say: “Show me the truth underneath all the tissue.” I look to the thyme and say: “Let me trap the lucidity that keeps me in my pain in my dreams.” I look pleadingly to the bloodroot, steeping it in the wine, and say: “Let me be free of my transgressions.”

Some boy tells me that my poetry is important. I don’t trust him. Even if I pretended I did, there are too many pages in my own handwriting, working through lessons on how to spoil visages and reveal the source of telling blood. I know what I have to do. ♦