Sanctuary
BY KARRIE WAARALA
His chair was my church pew. His tattoo shop my confessional.
Not that I would have told him. Not that he ever asked,
though the votive glimmer in his eyes said he made meaning
of the only purple on my thighs that would ever fade.
My nerves were flickering neon signs advertising
the scream still stuck in my throat, but he just went to work,
parted the stained curtains of my ruined skirt,
flexed the art in his fingers, made my shock take shape
into the kind of pitchforked devil I could face.
He’s been exorcising my demons for weeks now,
working his way through the backlog of mistakes I can’t unmake,
transforming the stack of bar napkin blueprints I thrust at him
into souvenirs of jumps plastered to my suitcase skin,
a haphazard map leading to the back alley that broke me.
His needles have prayed nonstop over me, only his occasional
wordless glance at the calendar noting I’ve been
stationary all summer for once, an exhausted hummingbird
perched in his bed, on his chair, under his hands.
Now I watch him sleep, his fingers uncurled
from the daily steady clench of their work, and gently wipe
a fleck of leaf green ink from his cheek
as sweat stings the new cherry blossom tree
unfurling up my spine, weeping a drift of
petals, the amen he didn’t know that he was saying.
I grind out my cigarette, pluck his shirt
from the floor, and slip out into a warm night rain,
quietly excommunicating myself.
His chair was my church pew. His tattoo shop my confessional.
Not that I would have told him. Not that he ever asked,
though the votive glimmer in his eyes said he made meaning
of the only purple on my thighs that would ever fade.
My nerves were flickering neon signs advertising
the scream still stuck in my throat, but he just went to work,
parted the stained curtains of my ruined skirt,
flexed the art in his fingers, made my shock take shape
into the kind of pitchforked devil I could face.
He’s been exorcising my demons for weeks now,
working his way through the backlog of mistakes I can’t unmake,
transforming the stack of bar napkin blueprints I thrust at him
into souvenirs of jumps plastered to my suitcase skin,
a haphazard map leading to the back alley that broke me.
His needles have prayed nonstop over me, only his occasional
wordless glance at the calendar noting I’ve been
stationary all summer for once, an exhausted hummingbird
perched in his bed, on his chair, under his hands.
Now I watch him sleep, his fingers uncurled
from the daily steady clench of their work, and gently wipe
a fleck of leaf green ink from his cheek
as sweat stings the new cherry blossom tree
unfurling up my spine, weeping a drift of
petals, the amen he didn’t know that he was saying.
I grind out my cigarette, pluck his shirt
from the floor, and slip out into a warm night rain,
quietly excommunicating myself.
KARRIE WAARALA is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing from University of Southern Maine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Orange Room Review, Foundling Review, PANK, Stymie, two national poetry slam anthologies, and on a coffee shop floor in Arizona. Karrie’s one-woman show based on her poems about the circus, LONG GONE: A Poetry Sideshow, recently made its debut. She really wishes she could tame tigers and swallow swords.