• Thoughts from a Believer



    I began questioning God on a Tuesday in 3rd grade
    as we cut thick, black-brown planarian in half
    with a scalpel that made my fingers twitch.
     
    “It doesn’t feel pain,”
    but I wonder if it screamed.
     
    ---
     
    My mother shakes and closes her eyes,
    palms up with strings of tension running the length of her arms.
     
    A heavy breath dropped from lips,
    rage,
    nicotine streaming through engorged veins.
    Tears lace her wet eyelashes like a net
    and she looks up.
     
    We stand in church beside my father
    and I reach out to touch her,
    to see if she is real.
     
    ---
     
    I stare at the list
    the College Board offers
    for religious belief.
     
    Maybe I’m a spiritualist,
    an aesthetic Catholic,
    a Santayana without the thick Spanish accent.
     
    But my trachea encloses,
    holes burned from brimstone
    and I swallow,
    checking UNDECIDED instead.
     
    ---
     
    Heaven seems too sterile
    for a woman like my mother.
     
    Valhalla,
    with its dark evergreens and glowing cinders,
    more fit for such a fighter.
     
    ---
     
    The man tells me, through thick glasses clouding his corneas,
    that religion stimulates that same part of the brain
    that drugs and sex and music do.
     
    I don’t argue, I don’t agree.
     
    ---
     
    She cries with little girl tears,
    shouting to the “I Am” that lives in our attic.
     
    Yellowed with age, her eyes search the cracks in the ceiling
    for answers,
    as I place a pillow over my head and scream,
    blocking her out.
     
    God is too tired to create a burning bush for my mother.
     
    ---
     
    One hot night, I have a dream about
    the land of the Israelites.
     
    Cascading dunes of fossilized finger bones, folded in prayer,
    trees relinquishing leaves of brittle parchment
    to a sleepy wind,
    heaving from countless tired lungs,
     
    the Holy Spirit,
    a large grey duck sitting atop a throne,
    pretending to be a dove.
     
    ---
     
    My little sister lays on a dirty blanket
    and wonders what life will be like when we die.
     
    I ask if she remembers the time before she was born,
    as if the question is the answer,
    and our eyes well in unison.
     
    ---
     
    To whatever God there is:
     
    You saved my mother from a hell that burned
    in between her ears,
     
    I’m not sure if I should thank you.
     
    ---
     
    I reach out to pull a single white thread
    from the infamous veil
    in front of my face,
    and it unravels completely.
     
    ---
     
    From across the lake we stare,
    watching her heavy ashes sink to the bottom,
    and I dare you to say that there is something
    bigger than us.
     
     
     
     
    Olivia Kane

    Olivia Kane
    Grade: 12

    Saint Mary's Hall
    SAN ANTONIO, TX 78217

    Educator(s): Amy Williams-Eddy

    Awards: Poetry
    Gold Medal, 2018

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