Everyday Blasphemies
Jennifer King
Last week my sister called, confined
and lonely from her backwoods Virginia town.
She was attending Mass again, she said,
missing the solace of a Sunday journey,
and anyway it was that or the Methodists.
I pictured her, still unbaptized, strolling
casually through the Communion line,
tonguing the Host like a hit of acid
as our renegade aunts had taught her.
Her new roommates were scandalized.
But I simply sat there, remembering the stone
Mary who stretched her arms across
my grandmother’s gardens, defending
against earthy sins. The weeds strung
themselves around her like homegrown
Christmas lights, scraped away at Easter,
at the renewal of the daylight season.
And I remembered another aunt,
willed to the church at birth, who returned
yearly to swim in her sister’s pool, borrowed
shirts draping and sticking to her body.
Her superiors preferred this public exposure
to our family, after we descended once
too many times on the tiny Queens convent.
My cousins and I were reprimanded that year
for racing retired nuns down convent hallways;
the Mother Superior heard the wheelchairs
squeaking from the chapel. Sisters, dancers,
swimmers alike - all Catholic by compromise,
women committing defiance, or revision.
Converting ruse into ritual, we sought ourselves
in every separate stance and pact, slowly
becoming holy, unofficially, and by degrees.
