When our heads are split open by stars, we will converse into daylight. Dirt-tinged fingers reaching out across the room, we cry tears of real bliss. Today I’m not religious but I still pray everyday for rain, my reflection catching on a car in a rusted lot. My mom calls only when she knows.

Saturdays we dipped our hands into gilded gold, scooped out its salivation, paint on the forehead the mark of salvation, leave for dinner to mod podge puzzle tables. It’s like that life is yours and mine, nondisclosure that fumigates family value wears now a time-woven crown of thorns. Pressed too thick to our skin to remove

Imagine if Jesus had painkillers like our parents did. No hell steeping through grates in our discrepancies. Indigenizing sin to original. Relapse writes scripture in thin lines that project spider veins on my face, pulsing out as roots of a sycamore, scrying my eventual repentance.

Like the sign of the cross, she knows I am harm, reaches out from across the moon splintering me into confession, the new life I forge strays from hypocrisy but straight into the comforts of home, suffering. Enjoying the pleasures crafted from god’s earth where we return to dust.