THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SKIN
BY NICOLE ROLLENDER
The words for God’s work are nail
through palm and drink my chaliced
blood. My mother schooled me with stained
glass, saints with anchors hung around
their necks, golden and risen now
from drowning. Or pierced with arrows,
the muscled shoulder and groin, wounds red
and shining open, alive. If you kneel down hard
in winter, bare knees in snow, frost-biting your tender
skin on purpose. Like holy men who flogged
their backs until the skin disappeared, laying
out the architecture of prostration, bent spine, web
of sinew wet with prayer-blood, you give over
your body. But if God’s work is expose the soul, if it’s un-map
the skin, if it’s trace litany breaking my bones, I thirst for holy
waters, then mother says, open up your body to the air.
To be sainted, leave your home in these silent trees. Slice
out memory. Pool blood. Girl, listen, skin your beauty
when my hand can’t cut. This one act will bear you
to paradise in iron claws.
