Virgins by Natasha Oladokun

Before this, I held my mother’s heart like a fruit.

Virgins

by Natasha Oladokun

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          Cleveland Museum of Art, after Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth,”

Cavernous, I wander the marbled streets of Cleveland.
Here, in a bright room within rooms 
I find my myriad selves, my many relic hearts. 
Some of my bodies are in green, endless fields. 
Some of my bodies are naked, eating immortalized fruits
while others recline in oil, backlit darkness.

Before this, I held my mother’s heart like a fruit. 
Hungry for love that took me years to name, 
I bit into life, 
took part of hers with me. My sin:
I ate, and made my love of women known.

Ours is a world of punishment and risk. 
And to love, as I love—the steel of women 
the tender of only the most excellent of men—
is to risk the wrath of men still, the wrath of my mother’s 
god, who sits on high and knows all hearts.

Christ and the Virgin in the house at Nazareth look on
while the people pass by, their sneakers squeaking like mice. 
The fertility clinic in my phone tells me I have seven years left 
to freeze my future, seven years to hem the risk 
I incur as the wife of somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son.

High on the wall the two virgins—one mother, one Christ child
with the face of a girl—work and needle their mending,
their holy books splayed open, their laundry crumpled like love. 

It’s not the queerness of Christ that holds me, or Mary’s tears,
but her weariness: This child will be the death of me..
Like a dutiful daughter, Jesus braids a crown of thorns
while Mary contemplates her life’s continuing labor.
They cling to their Heavenly Father the only way they know.

As I sit below, statued, blood gathers beneath my waist.
A relief? A failure?
In moments of grief, in moments like this, 
I hear my mother’s echoing reproach:

When you have your own one day, you’ll understand.