i. she walks softly, jesus on water, above all
speaks softer as she sits on the riverbank,
her voice skipping stones across the water
never falling in, never sinking underneath.
she is all i want to be but can’t reach
these shaking hands, these bruised knees
reflecting those prayers never answered
the echo of her laugh bounces off stained glass,
soft like a choir, holy like a church.
ii. they call me dissonance,
each step a stumble and each note a missed one,
this laugh a dying engine,
i have been driving away from my problems for years
but yet, i have never escaped myself.
call the mechanic, take me apart,
fix me, when i say fix me i mean make me her.
pull me apart like this fear, how it mangles the good parts,
and pulls me over on the interstate
to lead me back to a comfortable house arrest.
for years, i have been arrested within my own body.
iii. so call the priest,
exorcise everything I do not want to be but am anyway,
for i am peter who didn’t take jesus’s hand
i am ye of little faith, ye of clenched fists
i cannot fold these broken hands
or have faith enough to stand at all,
and so i fall, the cathedral burning in the background
of a painting in a nowhere town.
i am the legless dancer, the voiceless singer,
the awkward teen, every story in which
the main character is someone you don’t want to be.
i am forced to look at her in the mirror.
her shadow taunts me from the corner of my eye,
i pirouette, my grande jeté falters,
and i fall underneath the surface
of this girl i will never be.
she vs. i by Miceala Morano - Arkansas, U.S.