Conversion Therapy
BY THOMAS DOOLEY
In a sudden haze of kicked-up sand
I can’t seem
to catch my breath
on the beach and you insist
It’s a panic attack
as you shake out your towel
hand me the broken half
of a pale yellow pill
Take this, eat it
which I swallow
with watery wine and black out
in the car on Cross Bay Boulevard
just as the July heat lightning
strikes the sky Did you feel
that flash? you ask hours later
but the flash I felt
was years ago
through the soft sticky pads
plugged into a machine they thought
would shock me clean
I had to read Acts 9:11 when St. Paul’s
conversion begins when the Lord says
Get up and go
to the street called Straight
as scales fell from the saint’s eyes
as desire fell from my lap
as the church-appointed therapist coiled
the thick orange cord around his wrist
and wheeled the machine out passing under
a painting of Christ behind a sunburst
of broken bread
so when you broke in two
the pill, I too sat in a sunburst
of dying light
walked the beach and woke
to the same body I thought I had left
the same body my mother and father gave me
along with an abiding shock
of light to the back of my eye
it was when St. Paul regained his sight
that he got up to be baptized
to walk the beach drunk on a spirit
that sent him kicking up flumes of sand
and in the haze
in the panic of my life I took a pill
to believe in some small cure
