Kin to Lichen and Microbes

We who take it.

Coming back from the temple, a survivor.

She does not speak, she gestures, and it doesn't matter anyway, you do what she says you do, you get on your knees, you never leave your knees.

Great-grandfather (whose face is being eaten by the Chthonic One) begs for a chance to say "no you do not have permission to play in the park" and the hurricane laughs and laughs.

Ashes swirling away in the sea, may we take nothing else for granted.

First time I ate pussy I tasted blood, knew I was home, haven't been off my knees since.

Yeah you don't like it, I get it, I don't really like it either but why don't you like it, that's the question.

Long stretches of highway made bearable by rosary prayers.

Thought I would die, didn't die, now what.

Pissing outside at midnight, visiting the horses, listening to the river under starlight: this this.

I feel sorry for the soldiers who crucified Jesus, I would take them in my arms if I could, would go into hell with them if I could, be a dog for them if I could, a dog in a ring of Heavens.

Nobody leaves the jail cell until we all leave the jail cell, got it?

She reminds me I am kin to lichen and microbes, She urges me to let the whole yard go to violets and bracken, She says help the groundhogs dig their holes, and I listen to Her, I listen. 

This sentence is for the luminous bell-ringer, may we both go unhealed no more forever.  

Something Christmas-y in me.

Goddess of Bees, this weight on my chest, this gallows I am never finished building, this rainy quartz I never quite get around to swallowing.

Fuck or else.

In my mind I am still in Vermont, Massachusetts is a bad dream from which I am awakening, and then I wake up in Massachusetts and turn north, begin again, is this what you wanted.

This family church in which more than once I prayed against my own interests.

It took her a long time to die, a terribly long time, we have to go into this, Dad is it okay now I am going into this.