This poem also appears in the April 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 4, page 8). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Misfit Ghazal
Does grace come violently? That is not my story, except the part where
my grandmother is dead and took every story with her.
As I write, someone says a squeaky murmur, a ghost, or the radiator,
which is knocking, and this is the same story I tell myself every December,
the dead speaking to me, calling down to me in my hole.
It isn’t grace but it’s something, my same old orphan and witch story.
Which hurts more, the ugly-spirited sister, her words turning to toads,
or the diamonds from the lips of the good?
I was told this story as a small blond child, the size of my son now,
a child not so malleable as I was. His stubborn spirit is electric and present,
a story in the air around him, not just simmering underneath, like mine.
I look her up and see the woman from the Bible cured of demons or
disease, Joanna. A simmering spirit turned witness, that story.
