Praise the throat,
split like a furnace.
Every word, a coal.
Every prayer, a cough of ash.
Bless the girl with her stomach stapled in by fear.
Bless the girl picked last,
her name scraped raw from the roll call.
Bless the cashier who shouted sir
until the syllable rang like a gavel.
Bless the laughter.
It curled her spine into barbed wire.
Glory to the waiting rooms,
clipboards like tombstones.
Doctors carving diagnoses into her chest:
obese. unwoman. deviant.
Praise the paper gowns,
thin veils for the body’s indictment.
Praise the womb locked,
the locked womb,
the womb a cupboard of rust.
Hallelujah for the milkless breast,
for the ducts caging dust,
for the ghost child scrawling scripture
inside her body with broken nails.
Bless the sickness.
Skin peeling in bright sheets,
hair falling in clumps like burnt fields.
Bless the bald scalp,
a planet scorched clean,
orbiting shame.
Exalt the rage:
a hive splitting open in the skull,
glass bees slicing prayer to ribbons.
Exalt the rage:
a wolf gnawing daylight through the sternum.
Exalt the rage:
a red river surging the wrong way,
flooding the lungs, drowning
any saint that tried to sing.
See me, Lord.
See me gnash Your name to pulp.
See me spit it against the wall,
lap it back like blood.
See me curse and kneel
in the same ragged breath.
See me delirious, feral,
beating my fists bloody on Your gates.
Bless this rage.
Bless it though it torches Your altar.
Bless it though it poisons the hymn.
Bless it though it drags me,
burning, broken,
knife in one hand,
psalm in the other,
my voice a ruin,
my body a drum,
pounding, pounding, pounding,
still Yours.
