On a Visit from God During Sleep Paralysis
by Christina Keen Faber
I’m lying in bed, stiff as a crucifix. I think God is trying to kill me—
like the sand that softens an anchor’s fall, I can’t move
under the damning pressure that suffocates my chest.
In the silhouette of a hand-held lantern’s fading fire,
I freeze between the allegorical cave walls.
I’ll soon be on a quest toward an avalanching underground
if God finds out I never counted rosary beads.
For now, I’m stuck. I can’t argue my existence to a ghost, so I calm myself
by thinking of love: if flowers, oceans, winds, and stars
are created by God, then God is a maker of queer things.
Lovers orbit each other and plants grow greener. The world
lives as it should. I am alone in my body, no longer scared of God,
and fall asleep thinking of my ancestors who loved people like them.
My relative and their lover are both blue:
one is rainwater, the other the sea it plunges into.