What I Know of Bodies and Faith

1. You can feel every horrible thing that’s ever happened if you focus hard enough
2. If you let the body of you slip into the ghost of you,
   If you dig deeply enough into the meat of you
   You can walk backwards through your own brain and turn off every switch that makes you
   Tickticktick
   Like a never ending almost-catastrophe
   This is how you can find miracles
3. I know a girl who has never stopped dying
   Every moment she’s spent coughing up her own bloodied prayers,
   Being unmade,
   I don’t know if it’s God or the devil laughing behind me
   I don’t know if it matters
4. Sometimes at night, the wet grass after rain smells more like blood than anything else
   There are things buried in the yard that couldn’t die quietly
5. I think she is one of them
6. Or maybe we both are,
   Like bodies sacred or rotten hidden in the trunks of trees not quite ancient
   If I listened closer,
   I think I’d be able to hear every child’s first cry
7. I wonder what it takes to turn a tragedy into a miracle
8. I turned Death into a poem and then into a punchline
   And then I turned myself into something undying
   Which isn’t to say that I am something living
   It only means that I can still bleed
9. Maybe it was my blood in the grass the entire time
10. The girl says she doesn’t need to wonder when to trust herself or her god
    She says her faith is big enough to catch every version of the story and cradle it until it softens
    Sometimes bad things happen just because they can
    Sometimes the kid pulls the trigger or the plane crashes or your best friend’s body is never found and no one becomes any better for it
    Sometimes there is no lesson to be learned
11. I think the devil must have known that
12. I wonder if some tragedies can only ever be a tragedy