Our Lady of Sorrows
I take my face to the mirror
and see how well-rested
my regret has become.
How like a girl it is,
ready to play her game
of hide and seek
where nothing is lost
or dead, especially the dead.
My mother has been discovered.
She has a story, an apron of scars.
Our Lady of Sorrows behind the confessional.
Sympathy for the Devil, she said,
is artful artlessness.
That was her kind of compliment;
a nod to failure,
merciless, unlovable, correct.
If luck opened a window,
night would fall out
of its wheelchair
and pray to the lord β
stored beautiful and extinct
in his tiny gold refrigerator.
In the end, she forgot.
Her sins
were of the finest weaving.
How they whispered
chandeliers into the innocent darkness
where I hated her wickedly,
hiding my riot and hurt.
My mother loved me,
but it did no good.
God was still out there.
ΞΎ
Amy Thatcher lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she works as a public librarian. This is her first publication.