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That Teenage Feeling
- University of Arkansas Press
- Chapter
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That Teenage Feeling O sainted girls, divine Mademoiselles, help me make sense of your tedious adoration—two thousand years of incense smoke and fingerbones wound with rubies, souring sponges and slop pails, stiff-wired brushes better to shred young knuckleskin. What grace makes its home in the robin’s egg folds of your star-sprinkled gowns? What should we glean from your orgasmic smiles, and how does it feel to wrap His ring with pink angora for your chain, feel it bounce lightly between your breasts? Nights in your cell, upon your stony pallet, you long so exactly—such exquisite longing! Stuck in vague fits of desire the rest of us pray for a groom like yours, whose flesh is mountain, ocean, sky. A wafer of light in your open throat, and his born-ancient body melts upon your tongue; swallow and you are holy, wholly His. Under your habit, the goat hairs prickle, and nettle wreaths punish your thinning wrists. Dear Diary, he came to my cell with a corsage of charred forget-me-nots. 63 He said without words that I should not be long within these walls. My building has many units, spake the Lord. A lifelong lease gets you a mat, a hunk of daily bread. The martyrs shall spin you a tunic the moths have embroidered with tiny holes. Diary, every other boy’s too safe and much too sensible. Wouldn’t any girl burn her plans to watch her worldly husk float over the back yard barbeque, shed for wings? Who wouldn’t starve for a halo of homecoming crowns or scale the walls of hell to win His Class of Infinity ring? 64 ...