She’s Talking to Her Dreams
I don’t want to walk through Mardi Gras
in New Orleans, the same scene
played out under a would-be Memphis streetlight.
Yesterday, a colleague told me:
You’ve been working without conventions so long,
maybe you’ve forgotten standards.
It makes me think, effulgent;
she’s shining
a light inside me,
thinks she knows
who I am.
Stop wearing those beads around your neck woman,
they remind me of the rosary.
My mother gave me white nubs of plastic
and I sucked on the body of Christ,
let Him dangle down my back.
There have been more than forty days of denial,
over a decade spent wanting
flesh,
and repentance
doesn’t always come
three days before
or three days after
anything risen.
Everyone falls,
my preacher used to say
on Sundays we were invited
to kneel at the altar,
confess the grandiosity of our attempts
to pull ourselves back up,
latch on to the revelry of our convictions,
streamers drifting down
from the sky.
– adrienne lewis