Salvation Methods

Don’t tell anyone about the time we saved ourselves by pressing our bodies together in the cab and driving it down a ditch. It’s like the woman who turned herself into a tree because she had to begin somewhere so she began there. We read about cutting the hand that offends, and after our hands offended us, the knife felt insufficient in our grip. We laid out the moss so we could sleep like a folk song because the night grew blue cold and we had to stay warm somehow. Every time you hit me there was another stone to break open into fossils, and just when we decide we’ve had enough back into the forest we go. If I lost a tooth I regained my soul. It was better in the end if your forehead broke open on the trunk of a pine. Don’t trust the dusk because it doesn’t always mean it’s night and it doesn’t always mean we’ve been pardoned. These, our spirits anointed by darkness, tell us how this, all of this, and our guilt too, won’t save us.