Sinners Welcome
–Mary Karr
I opened up my shirt to show this man
the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up
like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.
I who should have been kneeling
was knelt to by one whose face
should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses
with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.
He’d sailed past the clay gods
and the singing girls who might have made of hima swine. That the world could arrive at me
with him in it, after so much longing—
impossible. He enters me and joy
sprouts from us as from a split seed.
Photo by Daniel Sandvik on Unsplash