About

I wrote this poem in junior year of college, during a Techniques of Poetry class I’d taken to round out my creative writing portfolio. I didn’t write poetry much before that class, and I honestly haven’t written much since then either. But a few of them have stuck with me. This is one of them.

I don’t remember exactly, but I think the prompt was to write about something sacred to us. Something holy, in whatever way that manifested. I’d like to think I succeeded. At least, that’s how I felt at the time.

Enjoy.

tarot

by kodi gonzaga

when i was sixteen, or fifteen, i think,

my friends took me to the phoenix & dragon bookstore and metaphysical shop

and there

i bought my first set of tarot cards.

*

i kept them hidden in a sock under my bed,

for i was raised on wafers of jesus skin

and the color of sunday sunlight through an archangel’s face

and the voice of an organ filling the ocean of stone

with a melody

that almost made me believe god was real

*

my nanny loved me and smacked me and cooked beans and answered my spanish and i remember a few years when she and her family and friends would gather in a concrete garage lit by warm buzzing bulbs and cold metal folding chairs dressed in all white and sing prayers

and she’d drag us along sometimes, tell us to sing, dance, pray

but my brother and i sat on the carpeted stairs near the kitchen, reading harry potter for the sixth time or playing larryboy over and over on a gameboy advance,

and did not trust the god that lived there.

*

there was that one night, don’t remember quite when

(the screams and the pain and the stress make it all blur, you see, all one childhood childlike mind you never truly grow out of)

and my father was yelling, again, at my mother

for no longer going to church.

Church.

he’d say it so reverently. the scripture and god and jesus are all what teach you to be good people

to my mother,

the woman whose own mother

my lola, senile and salty and sharp as a bored child’s wooden playground shank,

told an auntie who refused to baptize her son

your children will go to hell!

and who knows

maybe she’s right

*

i knew i’d go to hell the day they told us to speak about Gay People

eighth grade and sunday school on tuesday nights for some goddamn reason

shitty powdered donuts and juice, i hate juice,

and the girl sitting across from me in her leather jacket and black lipstick and god

god, i asked

why couldn’t you make me brave like her?

it will come with time, is what he answered.

he, i think,

we like to believe god is a woman

but the thought wrenches my mind and i don’t know why

perhaps my upbringing

perhaps the nature of men in my life

perhaps because god never came to my aid

because the soft hands and warm eyes i reveal so readily are things

i learned on my own

*

i was fifteen or sixteen or maybe older or maybe younger when in the light of that summer afternoon i bought my first deck of tarot cards.

and when i took them home and asked them how to feel

they listened

and answered

and i touched faith for the first time.