Emilia says
I’ve lost my faith
and I should bury a statue
of St. Joseph
in the garden.
I say, no, I believe in saints,
but only the unburied kind.
So she drags us
through the heaven tour:
a choir like ten thousand
Beyonces and St. Michael’s
scintillating armor,
his archangel feathers
broad as fiddlehead ferns,
white as Ivory Soap.
And those
wings, she says,
they cast no shadow.
So I explain I like my saints
like Deirdre
mopping other people’s floors,
or her autistic son
who loves Pokemon,
and his mother
and also red jujubes. Like
Sister Laura—a face they’d have
hanged her for in Salem—
telling the junior girls: beware
sexting, the boy with his hand
on your bra strap,
and the listening girls
all hopeful, aroused.
And Dave, radiated scrawny,
who’s called his wife
you crazy bitch
since his last treatment
and now sets coffee at her elbow
so he won’t
have to say he’s sorry.
Saints
distracted from Heaven
by bad knees and Red Bull
and too much
Game of Thrones. Like you,
Emilia, like
you, trying to save
my recalcitrant soul
while Sister Laura and Ivory Soap,
that boy’s hand on my breast,
jujubes and fiddlehead ferns—
all of it and both of us—
tumble into the patient dirt
not far from where I buried St. Joseph—
Plaster of Paris,
nearly eternal.
Gail C. DiMaggio