Today's poem is by Emma Bolden

When I Was Straight
       

In Catholic School we kneeled to learn
what it meant to be holy. On the playground
our classmates taught a different catechism

about what happened on your knees, how
a girl could lead a boy to ascension, a heaven
kingdomed within the bedrooms of our world.

It's only natural, they preached, the girls
with older sisters, older cousins, mothers
with lips loosened by their nightly sacrament

of Chardonnay. From the mount of grass
by the tire swings they sermoned sex as a gift
from God, sacred like a prayer. I couldn't

understand. I couldn't divine within my nature
what Amanda, Leia, Lauren said — and I
believed, I believed — made us human:

the wet and the open and thrust, the flush
pinkslipping two cheeks curved towards
a body, another body. Nothing in me knew

what it meant to want. In mass, by my bed,
hidden behind the bathroom's lock I dropped
to my knees and prayed O Lord make me

normal, make me enough. I didn't know then
that there were other truths just as natural
within the body, about the body, I didn't yet know

that absence doesn't always mean you're lacking,
that being is being, is beautiful, and enough.

themselves.

Copyright © 2025 Emma Bolden All rights reserved
from When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton
Small Harbor Publishing
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission