The Convert Wants Wounds, Not Scars

The wound on her lip goes white

before returning red.

The virus erupts the lines between chin and

lip, between lip and philtrum.

A sore across two continents of skin, a

bridge of lava.

She will feel healed when the flesh

color returns. The variation

is the aberration. Blood courses to

deliver a clot. Vessels

bouquet under the scalp or in the

womb, in places where we

heal fastest. Cells scramble

a lean-to scab, a mortar of new skin.

The body wants to draw its

seams together.

But Jesus hangs before the

convert eternally

wounded, eternally weeping

from his gashes.

How to open hers without nails or

thorns? How to measure

heartbeats without seeing blood

heave out its rhythms?

A gush slows under pressure

even as the pulse

goes on. Our lesions take air, our

infections seek sunlight. How to

resist our unwilled mechanisms to

staunch?

We push through the same tear in the

world and leave it sore.

When we come, we come open.

Pick a wound slow to bleed and 

slower to seal. We cream

the scar to fade our atlas of living—what

itched its way to a silver road,

what shadow constellation of pox. The

convert counts Jesus’ wounds.

If you count both hands and both feet, all

lashes and piercings

and the forsaken cry, the number is

higher and lower than anyone’s.