God Looks After You

I lie awake soaked in my blood,

your blood? her blood? his?

It doesn’t matter anymore.

Your tears are Nostradamus when I’m wrapped in your Armageddon

-your Dutch tulip field where purity lies weeping, drinking at the Sun’s boiled teat.

I might still be asleep.

Sleeping for the chance to split my skin

and set my body ajar

like the wilting heart

I keep in a vase

watching it pump fire from chimney to throat.

I am merely raw.

God should have left me aflame.

A box of matches and some kerosene.

Ashes to ashes, will I rekindle like a phoenix?

With my luck, I’d be reborn ceaselessly into the same hollow form:

same tired eyes,

same shallow skin,

same capricious mind.

My first birth challenged God.

I’m sure I made Him laugh—

bespectacled, tertiary, inadvertent…

another notch on the door frame.

another endless mouth to feed.

Mama should have murdered this that murders me.

But I skipped by with a fortune in my pocket,

“God looks after you especially.”

Too young to see the irony

of a life conceived Easter Monday

and begun the day after Christmas.

My first death will come on Holy Saturday

and I will never be holier.

Though my soul is growing weak.

It has seen too much.

First life? Not even close.

First death? No such luck.

I’ve been here a million times.

I’ll be here a million more.

Aimless, chastised, forging the documents on some off-shore lover that I cannot possess.

I was a capitalist last time.

Before that, a queen.

Mixed together I’m a manic depressive socialist stuck in a dream.

Sipping at men’s minds through bendy straws

And laughing at conformist pitfalls.

I like to play house when my tits are swollen enough to nurse the spawn as they cry “more milk mommy!”

but I’m sucking, still sucking, at that same boiled teat.

and my nipples are chapping but my arms are empty.

When will I be full—

of gummy mouths and California kings-

of Ashkenazi ringlets and broken glass.

I’ll rest my gentile head now.

It’s Lent and I need meat, my Lord.

My feet need washing but

St. Veronica won’t attend my crucifixion.

You may crucify me now.

And I will weep.

with my lactating breasts;

artificial formula glazing my strung out torso as a million eyes dissect,

they resurrect.

I will come again.