Christian Scientist

In Youngstown, Ohio where tragedies
happen at least twice a day and
it’s 7AM and workers belt bourbon
and beer before work and smoke cracks

the light over the bottles,
as women awake startled, hands
reaching for tissues, garments shut tight.

In the alleys we sought distraction
and the gap-toothed hag’s arms
seemed ready for flight. Everyday she tells us
about the night she ate a box

of twinkies and fell into a coma.

Nothing could save her. Like Lindbergh
she left her easy life and floated,
without modern instruments, toward Paris

to have coffee with God. I can’t go forward,
I can’t go back. They argued about Presley
and the Pyramids, laughed about the Irish,
and arm-wrestled for the danish.

Help me, make me stronger, but God triumphs.
He grandly points to his groin: “Seed,
Divide, and Don’t Buy Microsoft.”

In twenty minutes the EKG’s straight line
started to zigzag like a whore’s whip--

put back together she screamed for eclairs,
L.Ron Hubbard, and cable coverage.
They discharged her with warnings about the pills.

She joined a circus of preachers
as a minimum wage clown/masseuse,
short order cook, and reliable plant
in the hostile Midwest audiences.

She married a blind, bald man, reared Koreans,
bathed in barbed wire, and got sacked
over the cotton candy scandal. She came home.

She works the corners near here now,
threatening the workers with crossed fingers
pointed deeply in her pockets, following

other fathers to K-Mart
on Sunday mornings, mocking selections
of screw eyes and generic vice grips.

Weather and play become dull and damp
and our Faith, the whore, spreads with the morning,
leaning towards our younger brothers, puffing
and scratching, day in day out,

dreaming of rivers’ rapids, hits of codeine
and Wild Turkey, her future lovers,
because soon the loud whistle’s noon

alarms another fleshy heaven
that stains her thighs’ second shift.