My Last Dance with God

Multi-media art with nude torso of a woman whose face is covered by a large red apple. She is surrounded by architecture, a world map, fishing hooks, and people from other centuries. — “Alluring” by Devon Balwit

Tuesday is for worship night at the contemporary megachurch with my good-girl friend, where teenagers lift their fingertips to the hot ceiling, eyes rolling beneath lids as a man strums a guitar on stage, his shiny teeth nested beneath a heavy beard. He stretches his voice, warbles a little, forehead slick, furrowed heavenward. He ignores his sweat-darkened armpits and nipples that catch the light through his t-shirt and too-tight jeans tented at the crotch. I’m thirteen, freshly stung with eighth-grade angst and secretly enjoying my new ritual of imagining elaborate girl-on-girl scenes before bed. Colored lights craze the dark room and cut my friend’s face into stained-glass fragments. Her spit-slick braces fill with light as she smiles and takes my hand, sending a ribbon of electricity to my chest. Her head burns yellow, sparked with frizz. My palm pricks with sweat. All around me, bodies sway in shameless conviction. They exorcise, unbog their souls of worldly muck, forget themselves in a way that makes my face blood-full. My friend untwines herself from me, lets her head hang back. Her mouth slips open. Oh, to give this body over. I try it, raise my hands in the air, my red elbows jutting out. I shut my eyes and imagine my ghost joining the silky dust of prayer songs. I stand still. I feel like a scarecrow or the kid cast as a tree in the school play: everyone knows I’m not what I say I am. I’m the glass frog we learned about in biology, my organs thumping in a sack of translucent skin. That hard kernel of faithlessness, visible. The silver cross necklace I stole from Claire’s greens my throat. The music pushes itself onto my shores—ocean scum, weightless. And yet: the bodies around me flooded, swept easy as faraway rice fields. My own wrongness leaves me breathless. I glue my arms to my sides, rip a hangnail until it bleeds sticky on my fingers. Inside, I’m prairie-silence. I’m hard as a horizon line, as far as the eye can see, all that I don’t know, all the selves crouched in my dark corners, waiting to become—all the endless communions, the body without denomination, the body its own fruit, ripening.

about the Author

Originally from San Diego, Cora Schipa is a writer and poet raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she is a poetry reader for Grist and the assistant managing editor of Crab Creek Review. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Cola Literary Review, Rust & Moth, The Shore, 3Elements, Gulf Stream, ONE ART, Unbroken: Prose Poems, and elsewhere magazine, among others.

about the artist

Devon Balwit wakes early, walks in all weather, and edits for Asimov Press and Works in Progress magazine. For more of her poetry, art, and more, visit: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet.