Self Portrait at Age 5

I’ve been thinking a lot about little me lately. Deep in the weeds of editing my first poetry collection has made me quite reflective, and frankly, in awe of what I could handle as a kid. Sitting with the poems feels like connecting with the most traumatized parts of me in a way that feels tolerable. Plus, it’s allowed me to really hold those parts and for them to finally receive the nurturing they’ve needed for years.

I wrote this poem for 5-year-old me.

Self Portrait at Age 5

Every day but Saturday is spent at church or school,
which is the same place, prayer implicated as a skill
I was failing since my prayers were never answered. 

In my dreams, men in dark suits sprout crosses
from their throats like tumors. They eat God
from the pulpit, grind him between molars, wash

him down with blood. By morning, I know the lesson:
holiness is something that enters without asking.
I hide in closets where this truth is concealed,

inside gym lockers with parables stuffed in the slits,
inside fairytales I invent where no one kneels.
I’m not quite a self yet. I wear my father’s sadness

as my own. I am my mother’s obsession and compulsion,
a forever filthy thing she can never scrub clean.
Our house shines like a lie. I spend every Saturday

on my knees, a child-shaped penance, small hands
learning devotion through friction, scrubbing my way
to a future as shiny as a glass slipper that never

arrives. My brother darts from the house
as if it’s on fire—I try to flee after him, half
of me already gone. The window cuts me into before

and after. My father, blazing biblical, grabs my ankles,
pulls me back into his screaming red face devil embrace,
back into the hell of his fallen grace. I commit

my first heresy: I make a home inside myself
a private sanctuary, to escape the home I can’t leave.
It’s haunted by voices: saints, demons, daughters.

I give each one a name

*an earlier version of this poem appears in Gnashing Teeth's "The Cost of Our Baggage"