Not a Catholic, I have not confessed.
I do not sit in hushed cubicles
scented with humility and contrition. No. But
I have sinned in spades, if my rampant
dark thoughts are deserving of muttered
Forgive me Fathers, fingertips filed
down to raw as they slide over
my length of regrets like rosary
beads made of wire barbs and burrs.

How could I even speak the words?
How could I form my lips around words
that would rise like bile in my throat, taste
like poison, choke like gristle and bone?
How could I put voice to words that trip
around my love looking to land, like wasps
drawn to water? Here it is: Maybe

I would have left you on the doorstep
of a church, nestled behind the sturdy shape
of the Virgin Mary standing sentry
in her cemented arch. Maybe I would have
left you in the hush of a foundling wheel.
A simple turn of the crank to deliver you,
My own foundling, into the cold arms
of the church’s solid stone walls.

I confess. I confess. I confess.
What could possibly be the proper penance
for such thoughts, even if believed
in dark days of grief and growing fear
that life as I knew it was simply that,
life as I knew it. And from here on in,
life, life with my son, would be lived
with no hope,
no heaven,
no commandments,
no bibles,
no parables,
no proof,
no bedtime prayers,
no ease,
no forgiveness.

Yet through the window of my mind’s confessional–
complete with hairshirt and cutting edge–
comes, as it does, light and air and sound,
and perhaps possibility. I hear your silent
voice like a visitation. Not God’s, but yours:
Just faith, Mama, you say. Have faith.
Have faith in us, if nothing else, because:
We are the Universe.
We are Everything.
We are guilt and forgiveness,
sadness and joy,
past and future,
dread and love.

Absolution arrives in the beat
of your heart, and the knowledge that
I could not have abandoned you because
hope has not yet abandoned us.

I

Instead of sitting on a set of faded and splintered bleachers watching T-ball and hoping to see him reach first base, or standing restless on the spongy grass of a soccer field sidelines watching a mass of unidentifiable 10 year olds run relentlessly on the green pitch, hoping he gets the ball, hoping he doesn’t slip and fall, become folded into the scrum, I sit in observations rooms in therapy centers listening to my son struggle to say the phrase “watch me,” and I stand next to my child, feigning invisibility, as he falls to the floor, flailing, because he cannot manage his emotions when we must leave the mall.

That’s kind of the same thing, isn’t it?

II

Instead of leaving work early to pick him up at school for gymnastics class, carpooling his sweat-stinky friends home after, and standing among them in my kitchen as they grab pizza slices and mill around me like a group of warbling seagulls raiding a tipped trashbin, incognizant of what they are eating as long as they are eating, and hoping their parents fly them away before it gets too late to start the algebra homework that seems ridiculously advanced for fifth-graders, I leave work early to pick him up at school for a gastrointestinal appointment, careening through freeway traffic in the hopes of arriving only a little late but also in one piece since he distracts me with his whining from the backseat–he is hungry and thirsty but there is nothing, not the chips or the cereal or the cookies I brought along for just this thing, he will eat which is why we go to the GI clinic to check on the button we’ve had inserted into to his stomach from the outside so he doesn’t starve–, and then sitting in the waiting room, watching a family of many children mill around the mounted television watching Nickelodeon, but he and I sit alone on sloping chairs, waiting for his name to be called as he leans into me and says, as best he can, “scared.”

That’s kind of the same thing, isn’t it?

5 am morning
neighborhood quiet
my footsteps hushed
by a thin falling of snow.
How did I
become a woman
who wakes before dawn
packs a bag,
grabs a lunch,
descends slick porch stairs,
drives to the gym.
35 minutes and crunches.
25 minutes of weights.
Every day.

I cannot relax.
I weigh myself.
6 more pounds,
gone.
How long?
So far, 6 months. Giddy, I
shower. I soap
my body, listening
to the slap of other women’s
feet in cold puddles
as they move
from locker to shower.
I rinse my hair.
Perhaps the scale
is wrong.
3 pounds. 5 pounds.
Give or take.
Maybe
I’m dehydrated, maybe
I’m retaining water.
Even if I lost
a few
only
maybe
perhaps
At least
I am trying.

Oh how I can
talk myself out of triumph.