I asked my mother to do the impossible:
drive me to school with sun-tender migraines,
make pancakes when the antidepressants
left her brittle like a sidewalk leaf.
She tried to explain it was like asking her
to have a limb she was missing.
Please have a leg became her shorthand
to say she wanted these things so badly
but couldn't. After the divorce, my father
got injured on the job—not a machine
on the factory floor, but the hand
of a friend pulling a chair from under him.
He never told the friend. Couldn't sleep
lying down, could only grocery shop leaned
on a Walmart cart for a walker. My church
said the traveling faith healer could help.
I thought him like a car on a lift. If the healer
placed his palm at the bow of my father's back
and only if his faith was exact in measure
and kind would he be made whole, holy.
But my father never went. His belief in miracles
stopped before himself. I watched a teen boy
my age with a limp receive hands every year
and the boy's familiar forehead sweat
when the healer pushed him to walk too fast,
declared the boy's self-harm a miracle. I imagine
he rested for days for the performance of faith,
for the quick-pedaling across the stage when the healer
spittled into the wireless mic that this was the power
of choosing to believe. That this was power.
Copyright © 2024 Chrissy Martin
2024
Issue Section:
Creative
