A rebours

Your body is speaking
a language you didn’t choose,
my love,
one culture has already
decided.

It draws invisible lines
through your mind
and into your hand.

I am left-handed.

How sinister of me.

Perhaps that’s why
I’m always condemned.

Perhaps that’s why I feel
communion with the dead,
more attuned to omens,
more fluent in absence
than presence.

Don’t ask me to mend this.
I have no gift for healing -
that belongs to the blessed,
righteous-handed.

They make neat little crosses
over their hearts, mouths,
and foreheads.

They tell me
the stairway to heaven
spirals clockwise,

so they strap my hand
behind my back
with cords of discipline,

tell me holiness
has a proper posture,
that even broken bodies
must obey.

They watched
the angle of my wrist
like I was a warning sign.

It curls instinctively
toward itself,
toward some older understanding
the body kept secret
before shame took it.

Sometimes I wonder
how many souls were called deviant
simply because they moved
against the grain
of the world that named them.