Words: Alice McCloskey (she/her)
Head bowed against the baptismal font,
Wrapped in a permeating white.
Face turned upwards,
Not to the heavens –
Nor to the aching grimace of the Son pinioned to the room’s cross –
But to the allure of the light dappling through the windows around you.
You shiver at the cold water drops on your wailing frame,
Remnants of encrusted dirt scour the font’s marble rim
In the name of a Father
Whose scent is unfamiliar to your burgeoning senses,
Whose love feels not like the closeness of your Mother
But far-flung, removed,
Sifting through your small fingers
like ash.
In school,
In walls crammed with squiggles and phonetics
Prayers are taught to you benignly.
You learn how to kneel,
How to confess,
Leaving long red marks on your shins
From long instances of penance,
For spiteful, envious words
You must have retched into being,
Infused with the whispering guile
of the shadowy place beneath your feet.
You watch as the stain of guilt leeches across carpets crusted with Play-Doh and Lego.
With the gluttony of a throbbing bacterium,
You watch as it encroaches forward.
When it reaches you,
You hold it to your greedy mouth,
Consuming it whole,
Letting it reach inside your childish form,
Where it suppurates and putrefies.
The parasite of adolescence grows sluggishly inside you,
You sit in rows and rows of bare legs under scratchy polyester skirts
Oozing pustulence and rancid sweat,
Feeling the collective effervescence of hazy lust around you,
As wondering minds meditate on the elusive inner workings of the other sex,
Thoughts rubbing frictuously
Against the echoing fulminations of a priest
Whose condemnations and sanctimonious pleas,
Reverberate against the church walls
And the strained beating of your frightened, tentative heart.
You aim to dispel it in the sureness of lingering touches,
In laughter, and in new forms of worship.
Looking at it all now,
You think you have managed to stretch forward a little,
Morphing into a new shape.
You conjure a lone elk standing in a forest.
In a shivering, convulsing exorcism of the earth,
It sheds its antlers.
And pauses –
Looking at the ground around it.
Perhaps it sees the invisible shadow
Of antlers now lost to the silent blankness of pure, white snow
Feeling a hollowed-out cold –
Or merely, a quiet, sinuous relief.
