A Sin-Eater: The Death Of Eve.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wil and precious life?

Mary Oliver

What is worship to a body untouched by man?

If god knows of everlasting

love, shouldn’t his knees be

raw and

aching; maybe, it would finally be done correctly.

Sickly, you would find it was never the position of your tiny

hands that he would call; his sacrifice

must have become

Your fate when blood

spilled

outside that little body —

a ground of worship so holy only he could deem it clean.

The obsession weaned when she was thirteen along with the slimness of her thighs. She was a woman, categorically, but blood felt punishable in a body such as hers — It trickled intimately, smooth like wine and rivers and sin — at least she like to think her begging offered her the eventual desire to repent. She would stage each limb as if it were [Gods’].

A performance dedicated to [man] for [man], that when she reached the exhaustion of prayer, she would then be man too. She would wonder why everyone wished to be a saint, or holy and pure and infinite; couldn’t the body hold corruption?

At least, it would be enjoyable.

2.

She was a sin-eater, the devil, a whore too weak in her pleasure and dumb with folly desires. She was ravaged, metaphorically as if her body was already humanity’s and Adam’s and surely God’s.

(the) womb and (a) rib

The bruising of the apple sits between her breast. She holds the spec of nature, brutalized by its own condition to surrender, to fall, to give away, and she too wonders of the beauty she must hold. If she were to bruise so simply, by way of man or the rightful act of motherhood.

Which held death stronger?

(They both must stay fragile for enjoyment.)

3.

god, reveal what my truth is

4.

please father, make it stop. there is so much blood

5.

He laughed,

and one might consider sounds so sickly

raw monmentous,

but his desires never shied — He was laughing at me, at

each

broken

line

of /repent/.

How brutal of man to bite the body of their youth —

they must like the taste of their own blood;

it allows them to swallow their very corruption.

She wonders who would purify her father. Did her womb drive such care or has her guilt not purified yet?

Her skin is rotten, paper-thin; the veins bent into the faux lines of a tree. The hands of her god skim toward to weeping fingers; her blood wasn’t to fond for belief and a god’s hand never held much.

(she grieved quietly — it was not often one sacrifices their god)

6.

please god, why are you so quiet

please god, why are you so quiet?

7.

She briefly wonders who should respond first?

She could only hope that god pitied the [believers.]

They eat upon their skin as if it were his, as if they knew the contents of his blood. She was split open with guilt.

8.

[My guilt will not purify Me.]

9.

Take on the sins of God.

10.

She knew of the teeth she beheld, bones as bones.

She was nothing more than that, she imagines. The contamination that is her mouth, a damp space for want. She begs, once more, with an unbent back and aligned knees, until the sweat must burn.

She is still a child, even with the intent to murder such youth, yet unlike Gods, Eve’s blood never held a maternal hand; the notion to suckle upon the breast ultimately surrenders her rusted limbs.

After all, she only wished to be holy.

Mother?

What blood could purify that body now?

What little can be done, she thinks, about a body entrenched in sin and lacking in prayers. [What a broken worshipper a woman can be.]

11.

God was worse.

He knew how to bite, tarnished and split. He was sultury; he knew where to play, who to beg, how to ravish until the bursting of the skin was the fall of man and the birth of women.

It was the brashness of warmth, how it tingles upon the skin, makes liquid drop between the brow and ache from each eye;

the salt upon the tongue was a new coming. a replicate to each holy sip of wine smoothed between the teeth and hidden behind the jaw —

you were never

cold,

the wafer brought silence in a mouth surrenederd to

[swallowing].

The scribbles match the row of crosses, where does one put their name?

On the corner where the sun is drawn?

Does the importance simmer,

marred between his name first,

yours much later?

you hold his bones between holy hands.

//You bite each wrist first.//

12.

God, please. Bite me back.

God, you owe me.

13.