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"


Heidi!!!! Wow, thank you for sharing this with us.
I feel so sad for little you. I’m glad that you made a sanctuary inside yourself to survive and are still here to share your beautiful self and writing with everyone.