Zion

His black throat was so much more passionate
that the white Baptist preachers I had
previously known, that when he
urged the unnamed person in the crowd
to accept the Holy Spirit and the Tongue,
my brother and I stood as though pulled up by strings.

I was a little white girl, lost,
crying in the arms of three black women
in the kitchen of a chapel where the pews
all had fans on tongue depressors
with advertisements for funeral homes and
messages like The Redeemer Saves and Jesus Loves You.

I was babbling about a fear I couldn’t name;
foil trays of lasagna were being put into the oven.
I was afraid of words and names
of truth-letting and preaching
and the street prophet I thought
that I was supposed to be.

Would you like to be saved?
A basket of plastic forks rattled in someone’s
mama hands. I already am, I hiccuped.
They looked at each other, confused,
Then open your mouth, baby girl.
I’m sure she told me more than that as I clung to her.

I blew my nose and fell back
into the crowd, my mother was upset
that they mixed salvation with Holy Ghost filling,
she wanted to talk to the preacher, direct.
I looked for my brother, my neck burning,
and avoided my little sister’s curious face.

Who was I to go forward, saved already
at the age of three on a blue flowered couch
with my mother?
I looked for his embarrassment
that would match mine, but the small crowd
swallowed him up like a fish.
-Pliny the Dreamer, Zion