CONFESSION / absolution

Mary Magdalene

spit and mouthwash swirl down the drain

I wipe my mouth cleaning off my lipstick checking the mirror, I look myself in the eyes

I rub my neck feeling for dark marks

I’m ready

I don’t look sinful right now at least I think

I turn and meet my family with a smile I am their Madonna eldest daughter, meek, sickly sweet we beg for God’s forgiveness every Sunday absolving our weekly sins

I kneel in church pews and my mouth sings about their God

O love of God, how rich and pure! pure like me pure like them

I don’t think my mom knows I’m a sinner at least not yet her purity ring has been on my finger tightly fit since I was eleven I am their little angel

I got a letter from my church last night

Cheryl sent me an Applebee’s gift card begging me to visit we miss you, she said God misses you don’t let the world steal away your kind soul sorry, Cheryl, but

I think my soul is already blackened blackened like the rich stain of my cinnamon lipstick on his mouth like the cherry purple marks of his lust on my breast like the night coming through his window

I arch my back and say

I do want this, I do want you he kisses me again and says okay

I am a whore I have broken their commandment

God’s, my parents’— my purity ring has been converted to jewelry taking up space on my finger that once belonged to God it now belongs to me in all honesty I’ve never been Madonna for ages I’ve craved the sinful stains of sex I kneel in his room and my mouth makes him praise me he runs his hands through my hair this is a transcendent kind of worship I disappointed God years ago so why make Him happy now? instead we make each other happy pleasure and passion and perfect soul-poison velvety touches and soft sighs of delight tracing my finger over his spine breathing him in the salty smell of skin on skin on skin on skin

I revel in being human this time, mouthwash swirls the drain in his bathroom sink

I look myself in the mirror am I ready? do I want this?

I go back to his bed the answer is yes, yes, yes he asks why are you so excited

I whisper

I have never been Madonna

I have always been the whore and for that I forgive myself

Silhouette Xander Fuhrer

I see a subtle figure gently poised

Inside the twilight azur of my youth

Unknown to my desires or my thoughts

Yet woven into every distant dream

And passing scarlet reverie; She weeps like bow to string and hand to key

In strange unfocused flux of rain-blurred glass, and In moments,

Caught between the folded lines of this short life

A light shines through

The raindrops and the glass still there, But brilliant and astounding in the warmth of their dilution

And in that distant beam through murky glass she is made real

A shape as yet unformed within

My long dark formless shape;

In radiance she dances, painted in A blinking harmony, A poetry of images on

Analogue animate cel, Her dark geometries recast in negative upon me—

And what’s a negative?

In film it’s half the process, the inner nature that the chemicals produce, And with another of its kind it changes, positive, The outer nature past the inner glass

Two darknesses within to make a brightness there without;

So what am I, then,

When I reach out and I feel her in the keys here, as I type, what am

I When I feel her in the mind up past my fingers?

In the body—

And I can’t see

It’s blinding to look past the glass at what I know lies there;

It is a terror

...but I’ve long loved fear

And sadness

And the dark

I’d say it’s since I lost him but it isn’t; it’s been since birth, This comfort in macabre

In the richness of the night’s enshrouding

A stage broad as the world for catharsis’ Lethe rush

Because the tragic is much like the comic

Finding pleasure in opposites and paradoxes— in my opposite, my paradox

—and then how to her am I, but Another shadow, another negative, A way out to the world?

How much longer will it be

‘Till that glass curtain falls away— A nd by my hand or hers?

Will it be something vacant, Another revelation-addict’s door to More of the mundane?

Or will it be what even now I dream

The truth I waltz at midnight with, Too close-held to let out

And how am I to him?

A panacea? He knows there is no panacea But an Answer

Yes, an Answer

That separateness in language

Grows exhausting, like an obligated lie

What’s in a name?

She whispers, for the dozen thousandth time

Everything and nothing

What’s a name but flesh?

A pretty obfuscation of the truth, No gateway to reverie,

But synecdoche for all the eyes outside

Repeated and reborn and re-abandoned

Silhouette, negative, glass, panacea

The truth inside the lie has made it sick: the seams have ‘come needles

< Illbearings >

How long? How long until I break the glass myself?

Until I pull the curtain back?

For how I’ve felt the stretches of sublime when our palms meet

And I am her And she is me

And the question mark that follows every voyage past perception

Vanishes

—and no one talks about the euphoria

The everything and nothingness of that, Of being whole.

The silhouette is beautiful, pure, distilled

But its symmetry is forced

An abridgement’s lilt of truth: It is pulled back, My eyes burn, and the cold of that Long dark moves through my bones, And the blue rain past the glass has no Warm amber lighthouse touch, But I am real.

Message from Home Lily