My Own Midwife
I am angry enough to die. Jonah 4:5
The fish was convenient. Had I fled across the desert,
you would have sent hyenas to kill me
or perhaps something harder, a poisoned fruit.
Those three days I considered your call
for death. The cost for my betrayal
to become part of an underwater compost heap.
I was covered with fish vomit,
afterbirth ruining my clothes. I was never meant to die there
but be born.
And I was.
I was my own midwife,
the whale my mother.
I was spit on dry land, a puff
of smoke, a backward landslide,
the desert’s prodigal disgrace.
My flesh was new, betrayed, invisibly scarred.
But I knew what had happened to it.
I understood the mutilation made by hands seen and unseen.
On land, in the alley, I had trouble walking.
Crawling hurt less.
Left foot, right foot…
but I was born something different, something darker.
You called me, tried to kill me, made me a liar to the Ninevites.
Sent a worm to destroy the only comfort you hadn’t stripped,
and while I was still bleeding in the shade of the dead plant,
that night in the form of a dumpster,
I had nothing from you, kindness nor crust of bread.
Was my existence enough to justify betrayal?
Did my skin punctuate the end of your prophetic sentence?
Were my body and the life you spared testament
to your divine love and compassion? Was leaving me
with nothing but humiliation and wasted foliage
the true cause for my false prophesy?
In the dark of my womb I assembled my new body
by gathering what was left, what you hadn’t gotten
your heavenly hands on, and my heart I filled
with crows, prophet birds, and in my ears
I put the sound of a thousand slaughtered
cattle. My mouth clenched on curses and
my eyes permanently emblazoned with
the barrel of a gun.
I still hear prophesies sometimes, dark premonitions
of doom and destruction,
first the fire, then the soot,
but these aren’t your words.
No message of compassion and forgiveness,
some elusive divine grace.
No. My prophesies now consist of retribution.
Lilacs growing in shit.
A piñata filled with buzzards.
Your symphony
has only violins but under this din of skin
I am deaf.
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