1.
Start at Our Lady’s gazebo, where all curse
words are learned and saint cards are traded
like baseball heroes. I give up three St. Lucy’s
for a shiny St. Cecilia. I want harps and wings
on my side, I want whatever I say to sing.
The church is for honors and pamphlets
and quick announcements, organ music
so every celebration is a funeral.
I receive what I need to receive
but cause trouble by refusing to kneel,
telling all the pierced ears in the pews
about the nine circles.
Dante was Catholic, it’s okay.
Dante? Damian? That’s the devil’s name!
When my voice is taken from me,
I study the mural of a bare-chested angel,
imagine him descending on the altar, giving me
his spear.
2.
Continue to the cafeteria,
priests with ruddy cheeks and new sports cars
asking children to rise before pizza.
No detours until faced with the Girl Trinity:
Amber C. more metal than teeth, gaping
at the stage where she’ll splay herself out
as if creating a snow angel, emitting
her cyborg rage.
Diana T. dropping her grizzly
restaurateur father’s name
like a Bronxian queen.
Jaimee B. with her arm in a cast,
soon where the needles would be.
I am still talking cards when they look
at my wrists and ask me to check my nails.
Does he look at them like us? Does he need polish?
The Girl Trinity laughs,
never in unison but
one right after the other. Taking cue.
I wonder where my patron saint of voice has gone.
My pocket is empty and
I cry.
3.
There’s no wonder why in time
the boys will be called users or players:
videogame emotional gamut/gauntlet
running like the hallways,
everything coming in tallies and levels,
including a gauge for intimacy
with the librarian—
marking off
their advances,
talk of tattooing only the longest consecutives.
When I discover this binary is not my language,
I confess to having lovely thoughts
about a boy in votive shadow,
his choir voice deepening
and mine going higher and higher
until we’ve both ascended
and I’ve forgotten all about the angel in the mural.
I’m given penance.
Prayers in quantities suggested by priests,
numbers for the infallible.
Despite my transgressions,
I’m told I have a calling to the priesthood.
There are winks, like they know me.
My mantle must be incandescent.
4.
Due to a user’s memorial,
the palm festival is cancelled and so
the Girl Trinity gets on stage
(pillars of the griefletting pantheon)
to perform a story from Revelation.
Our Judgment has come and anticipating
violence, ketchup is thrown in eyes.
Someone thinks they hear a bat in the rafters.
I consider the priesthood
of a religion of my own making,
living monastically.
5.
In our last year, rounding the gazebo:
The school decides to plant a plum tree
in remembrance of the organist’s son,
a teacher who taught the users how to play.
He did not tell me to join the priesthood,
but shook his head, no no no no no.
Be happy, instead.
Noticing my frequent tears, he wrote me
a note and included a card of my patron saint.
I don’t know how he knew, but I think
about how we can get him canonized.
I make sure no one sees when I bury his note
under the leaves, when the plums grow fat
as my doubts.
Now, after all that
morning news,
another elegy.
Joseph Dante lives in Plantation, Florida with his husband and two cats. His work has been featured in Permafrost, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, PANK, Corium, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2016 Lascaux Prize for Poetry.