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"Exegesis"
Ours is a conversion story, all stories, a parable as always: waiting in darkness
near unlit caves, we came bearing water, bearing spices too good to season
or save: darkly that stone unrolled and both of us, shyly, bet on the coming. Impossible
virgins and rumored whores, collectors and payers of taxes unknown, ours
was always a laddering down, a climbing to meet where the frame shook
its hardest. We confessed, lost heads, each crossed the foot of the other
with tears and hair and the babe in your arms was not suffered to me because we thought
better judgment. Of the stories we knew most ended in haloes of fire, with lions
asleep on full bellies, a horse for each damned direction and limb and those who rose
from death to new life more often than not woke up alone. What, then, becomes
of a heart on its stake? Better ask what comes next: the ladder holds. Horses spit
through the reins. And desire, its own righteousness, makes of one basket
enough. Maybe there was no miracle, but even the unreligious tell
stories: of how each restored sight requires the blind, each laying of hands
an open sore, how for every wound that gets sealed up, there is also left a scar.
—Elizabeth Langemak
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