CW: child death, starvation, suicide

the Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of death, and so man became a mortal being

I had my first panic attack sitting in the cold wooden pews of St. Aedan’s Roman Catholic Church. 

A priest was standing on the second green carpeted step leading up to the church’s altar, shadowed by the statue of Jesus’s crucifixion behind him (I have stared at that statue more than I’ve stared at any other piece of art. I can picture the crevices of his sharp ribs better than the bridge of my father’s twice broken nose). 

He told my Sunday school class about a young girl in Florida who died from starvation after removing her own PEG. The girl told her family that God wanted her to rip it out and refuse all nourishment except His Word. 

I listened with seven-year-old ears as the priest declared her suicide saintly. 

After getting carpooled home I found my sister laying on our green carpeted living room floor. I sat, crisscross applesauce, next to her, I lifted her shirt, and I stared at the PEG protruding from her bloated, three-year-old stomach. I decided that if god wanted her to be a saint, I would be the serpent. If god asked her to die for his word, I would make her live for mine. 

That night I dreamed of a goliath, open black casket, the inside a dark hole that ate anyone who leaned too far in. 

Nine years later her real casket sat at the bottom of those green steps. It was tiny, white, and lined with satin. 

before you could intervene I ate the fruit from both your trees and now I am like you. 

you can press your bread to my tongue,

but my saliva can dissolve it 

and make a thick oily synthetic tea

that I can spit out onto the tip of your outstretched tongue.

I know you’d rather spit out what I’ve made

than swallow it

for swallowing isn’t for those with

two apples in their stomachs.

so go ahead,

spit out my body 

which I have made from you,

it will not change

what’s in my belly

nor that I am now you.

Tadgh Murphy (he/they) is a Chicago based poet so touch starved they want to hug the rats that scurry through the alleyway behind their neighborhood liquor store. His work has previously been published in Sledgehammer Literary Journal. Follow him on twitter to fuel his ego: @crunchypeachboi