By Lindsay Bernal
We missed dodgeball for it, were shuffled from gym across the snowy parking lot into the manse to collectively witness and reflect on this display of sacrilege, blasphemy, supervised by Sister Kathleen, our irascible guidance counselor, who had just revealed to my mom my hypochondria: for months I’d taken refuge from lang arts in Nurse Reddington’s office, complaining of dry eye, growing pains, nausea, headaches, my mystic impulse peaking in third grade.
Maybe the TV was a Magnavox Perfect View. The video begins almost black and white, assault-noir, but shifts to full color at the chorus inside a church inside a dream. No end and no beginning. A suppliant brunette Madonna falling out of the sky into the arms of a choir leader, then released back into her vision, her maroon negligee clinging to her, the crucifix around her neck nestled in her creamy-white cleavage. When she really starts to get down, to dance the dance I’d try to recreate later in my bedroom, she’s in Golgotha, the crosses behind her inflamed, encroaching.
I drooled at the screen, my whole body aching toward it. I wanted her to visit my school, to teach us the choreography, her skincare regimen, to ask her if she preferred Pepsi or Coke, if she, too, fantasized about Jesus, half-naked, long-haired, mysterious. Ask her why we must choose between God and sex. Why only some saints are incorruptible. I wanted to ask her, and I wanted to be her. Who wouldn’t resurrect the Good Samaritan by kissing his feet, his tears, his open mouth. And who wouldn’t cut herself—stigmata by chef’s knife—after such ecstasy?
Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn’t Have to Do With (University of Georgia Press, 2018), winner of the National Poetry Series. Poems from her second manuscript appear in Chicago Review, the Georgia Review, the Hopkins Review, New England Review, Oversound, and other journals. She coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where she also co-directs the Writers Here & Now reading series and teaches undergraduate poetry workshops and courses on poetics.
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