Church
Church
When I was 16 in church—and I say church like a new witch panicking over a dried-out plant—It was raining oily, hot, summer rain. The sun had been blotted out by the grey all day, and nobody had an umbrella.
The fake wood foyer was already smelling like mold from our soggy shoes. The warehouse was stale and chilly, (who has church in a too-long, all white warehouse?) but I wanted to be warm and slick like black car oil in the rain.
I wanted to pull a rainbow through the clouds, shake up the place with my freedom from the Bible Belt. But more than freedom did I want wrath, destruction.
To tear myself free from the frozen lake on a chariot of seahorses, to rip out the always at 50-degree AC, to break the podium over the head of the preacher, and impale the spank-swollen hands of their wives with the splinters, telling me that I’d be better off hanging from a tree, than to love who I loved or to get drunk off Pomegranate wine late at night.
To flip off the 6-year-old gap-toothed boy, who said I would only waste time if I went to college instead of getting married right after high school. Even though his mother had a bachelor’s degree.
So, I imagined a willow tree, no longer weeping for a long-lost brother but imbued with the wrath of all the witches and True Gods and lovers before me, crushing the roof, the pews, swallowing the screams of demons.
Great-grand mother nature scolding the great I AM. The willow would wheeze exhaust fumes, bleed oily rain.
I’d thank her as I’d step over her cooling corpse,
Iris’s rainbows glinting in my hair and Nike’s wings taking me away.
