Between condemnation
and salvation, judgement’s
distance is slight: see Sampson,
depleted, with his sight
gouged out; venerable Lucy
ferrying her wet green eyes
on a golden tray. On YouTube,
today I watch a juvenile
python devour a teddy bear
to please its captor, two
bulbs of light, a blue-
and-white striped hand
towel, even the scaled
belt of its own tail, until―
like a magician’s assistant
met with the saw―the coiled
muscle ingests itself
by half. The camera zooms in.
I pause the clip, consider
each trick, queue the whole
thing back. Is it theory
wrenched from memory?
A child, I stole the infant
Christ from Sister Leonard’s plush
nativity set; pried off one eye
then tucked the glass bead
in my sweater until, scot-free
in a corner behind the fenced-in
swings, I pressed it
under my tongue. Liar,
seethed the priest in the box
when I swore I had nothing
to hide. On tape, the snake
struggles to consume
what’s left of a moon-
bright egg, gumming
the pocked globe of it.
Impossible―but the damned
thing won’t let go. Eight
years old, what was I
meant to confess? Some falsified
test, guilt’s unanswered
demands wadded like paper
in my desk? When I was
a child, I thought like a child, reasoned
like a child, swallowed the eye
so that Christ might see
He lived inside me.