the hands of god

i was six years old in a pew too big, swinging my legs, counting the breaths

between each amen and the next forgive me, father. 

i felt my own name pressed under my tongue, didn’t say it out loud, didn’t belong to me yet. they said i’d feel whole if i let it in, dipped my hands in water too cold.  

said it would make me clean 

but i just felt owned.  

pressed their thumbs into my temples, prayed while the words lost shape.

said,

"this is yours now—  

this body, this fear, this debt you’ll never pay back."  

so i bit my tongue ‘til i lost the taste and wore my bruises like rosary beads.  

i got sick in the parking lot 

spit up something i swear was moving.

a woman with soft skin wiped my mouth, told me i looked just like an angel. said i was saved. but i never asked to be.

and god is a man with a voice like a gavel, a hand on the back of my neck.

tells me to kneel, tells me to listen,

but i don’t wanna listen anymore.

and god has hands like my father’s, a grip that bruises. 

holds me still, whispers this is love,

but i don’t wanna listen anymore.

there’s something dead in my stomach. there’s something dead in the walls. there’s something rotting in their hands. 

sour and holy and all wrong.

i smell it in the pews, in the hymn books, in the velvet lined boxes. it drips down the altar steps, it soaks into the tile.

they just kneel, just whisper, just swallow it down.

and i try. i do. but my hands are shaking, my stomach is turning, my body remembers what it shouldn’t.

and i think—

i think maybe i was never meant to be here.