Amy DeBellis

Things I Only Learned After Sunday School

How the world is nothing like a flower. How it starts to smell

like meat when it’s spread open. I collide with an ex-lover

outside CVS: my eyes grim and pink with a cold not quite shaken,

trying to form pleasantries through the phlegm in my throat,

my voice slippery like afterbirth. Everything circling

back to itself in the end. On overcast nights I watch searchlights

fail to imitate stars, track their ragged bloat

against the clouds, their peripheries like cell walls expanding,

exploding, like the cells of a nuclear worker after radiation

skinned him, shucked him of DNA, left his body a ghost

breathing on borrowed time. I never stopped to ask what kind 

of god would allow this. I swallowed down all my questions

and let men enter my body like prayer. These days, I remember

how I knew, even then, that the statue of Mary mourned better

than I would ever be able to. Sundays spent learning to hate

my mouth and the shape of it. Clasping my prickling thighs together

in a pew, palming my unwanted wanderings, pretending that the lines

in the vaulted ceiling were nothing more than the inarticulate veins of trees.

Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, Write or Die, HAD, Pinch, Monkeybicycle, and others. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books in September 2024. Read more at amydebellis.com