​The Goddess

The Goddess

I think she might be in love with me. Over the past few months she’s brought me many gifts: a Vietnam War era bayonet, a ball peen hammer, a chef’s knife, a pair of pants that are eight inches too long, a book of artwork containing pictures by Klimt, Cezanne, Picasso, Chagall, a book she stole from a thrift store.

In exchange I give her lentils and rice, grilled cheese, chicken soup and mashed potatoes. Following the exchange of gifts, we talk. By that I mean, she talks while I listen. It is like listening to the wind at midnight. You don’t make sense of it. It just is.

Sometimes she tells me she thinks I’m her father. Sometimes she asks if she’s my mother. She tells me that she is a queen and has over a million children, but that no one loves her.

“Everyone hates me,” she says. Her face is lost in the folds of her hooded sweatshirt. Her hands are dirty. There are crude tattoos on her fingers. The letters are mixed with indecipherable symbols. Her hands fly up to the sides of her face, and her mouth opens in silent suffering.

“I hear them screaming all the time. Why can’t anyone help them?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

It is late. I need to sleep. I tell her so. She says nothing but goes into the bathroom. I hear the shower running from my bed. Alexa play four or five songs while the shower runs. Then the shower stops and she comes into the bedroom quietly, naked, her hair wet and dripping while Alexa is playing a song by Gregory Allen Isakov, “She Always Takes It Black.” There is a nautical star tattooed on her abdomen, and something tattooed on her arm/shoulder that seems to change whenever you look at it.

She is perfectly normal in bed– responsive, beautiful, lucid–as though sex is the one medication she needs to be sane, whole, and complete. She is completely present.

I, on the other hand, am a thousand miles away. I do not love her. I cannot love her. It is biology, nothing more, but her kisses are honey mixed with wine and musk and opium. She is pure instinct without inhibition, a pulsing membrane of desire, lust, pleasure, love. She is Aphrodite, Freya, Rati, Hedone, Hathor, and Kurukulla, a vessel in service to the whims of the goddesses who inhabit and possess her.

Afterwards we lie in bed. She is lover and wife. Then the walls begin to dissolve. She starts whispering about her lost children and how someone is trying to poison her. She asks if she can move into the spare bedroom and design clothing or study architecture while becoming rich operating a recycling center.

I get out of bed and put on my pajamas. I go into the living room and sink into the leather sofa. My mind is both empty and full at the same time. I search for words to describe what I feel, but language is useless.

While I am struggling to make sense of what has transpired, she appears in the bedroom doorway. She is fully dressed: Pair of torn jeans over black leggings; long wool overcoat over a hooded sweatshirt; a dress that comes down to the hole in the knee of her jeans; pair of leather hiking boots with fluorescent pink laces.

“You have any money?” she asks.

I get up off the sofa and go to the change jar. I pull out rolls of quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. I put them in a paper bag and hand it to her. She puts the bag into a designer purse, that she stuffs into a giant backpack.

“I’m going,” she says. Then she leaves. I go to the door and watch the vessel of goddesses wander out into the moonlight. I pray that she does not return and that she does return. I pray for the courage to call her back and the wisdom to let her go….

The Goddess II

I arrive with my arms full of relics—

a bayonet, a hammer, a knife,

trophies scavenged from the ruins of other lives,

offerings for a man who feeds me warmth:

lentils, rice, soup that tastes of memory.

He listens as I speak in riddles,

my words the wind at midnight,

my thoughts a flock of blackbirds scattering

against the bruised sky of my mind.

Sometimes I am a queen,

crowned in tangled hair and sorrow,

mother to a million invisible children

whose cries echo in the hollow chambers of my chest.

Sometimes I am a daughter,

sometimes a mother,

sometimes a ghost haunting the edges of his kindness.

My hands are maps—

dirty, tattooed, trembling—

etched with the coordinates of every place I’ve been lost.

No one loves me, I say.

Everyone hates me.

I am a cathedral of loneliness,

my stained-glass heart fractured by too many storms.

I ask him why no one can hear the screaming—

the children, the voices, the wolves at the door.

He does not know.

No one knows.

Night falls like a velvet curtain.

He says he needs to sleep,

so I slip into the bathroom,

let the water run over me,

hoping to wash away the static,

the poison, the ghosts.

When I emerge, I am reborn—

skin wet, hair dripping,

music curling around me like incense.

I am incandescent,

a candle of desire, passion,

a holy black flame of love,

that burns with a light

no one sees.

I slip into his bed,

shedding my armor,

and for a moment I am only a woman—

not a queen, not a mother, not a myth.

Here, I am whole,

my body a temple,

my mind quiet,

the world narrowed to the warmth of his hands,

the poetry and rhythm of his body and tongue.

But the walls always dissolve.

The world seeps back in—

the lost children, the poison,

the dreams that unravel like thread in the dark.

I ask if I can stay,

if I can build a sanctuary from scraps and hope,

and the eternal midnight

that sifts through me

like dark sand

through the hourglass

of my body,

I command him to love me.

He leaves the whiteness of the bed,

like a word escaping

from the tyranny

of a written page,

and I gather my layers—

flannel dress over jeans

over leggings,

overcoat over sweatshirt,

boots laced with fluorescent pink.

I ask for coins, not for greed,

but to weigh me down,

to keep me from floating away

like a balloon cut loose in the night.

I pack my bag with change and longing,

tuck hope into the folds of my coat,

and step into the moonlit street.

I am a vessel for goddesses and ghosts,

a wandering constellation,

praying for a place to rest,

for someone to call me home.

I do not know if I will return.

I do not know if I want to.

I am the wind at midnight,

the queen of lost things,

the goddess of leaving,

with only the star above my naval to guide me,

and the night is my vessel

in this ocean of suffering.