deferred notes on faith deconstruction (a poem in five parts)

1) air hunger that heralds May limping into

June, waiting for a baptism not unlike the

one I had at 15 when I knew nothing of self-love

except the axiom of surrender. “Until the end,"

I heard (my voice) rattling behind my eyes as

the water warmed me. I emerged vacuum-sealed in

a middle school field trip t-shirt wishing I didn't have

breasts.

//

2) the youth group girls who witnessed and whistled

at my shaky confession of sin innate and erring still

circle me on social media, flaunting their travels abroad,

their sturdy summer arms like sunning vultures, surely

regarding my disabled body as a tragic byproduct of my

atheism. What do they know of the weight of my limbs?

My new denial of the flesh.

//

3) I've always longed to crawl out of my skin, even

before the wasting muscles and tremors. There remains

a spiritual tonic of escapism - to depart, turning a burial

into a planting. Still, no longer can I buy into the

gimmick of the Church veiling humanity with simplicity

and shame. The last time I felt 'God' was in the ocean and

that was only because I felt small and weightless.

//

4) At the baptism reception with dripping hair, I was

(even then) deeply lonely in my own way, as all

young girls are. Playing at piety. I did not enter this

world with the belief that I deserved hell. In naked

rebellion, I arrived on a snowy Sunday in February.

2/25 at 2:25 a.m. I cried until I learned to walk, pensive

and punctured by the sharpness of life. I learned to

count the seconds between lightning and thunder

without envisioning a man in the sky. In first grade,

I felt bad for the Seventh-day Adventist boy at school who

couldn’t celebrate Halloween. His name was Moises and

he seldom spoke.

//

5) Inevitably drawn to the violent poetry of the pulpit

but too green to examine its underbelly of contempt

and self-loathing, the ubiquitous adolescent feeling of

displacement had me close my eyes to humanity -

increasingly terrified of sexuality. Truly, my mistrust of

this body began long before I internalized the mental strain

of chronic disease. It was the core of every sermon. Ironically,

in being 'born again,' I betrayed the constant evolution

of being, of loving, of me.