Glow

“Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die.” –Psalm 13:3

All that kept the glow has left my eyes.
Years forgetting the sun can shine so far
while rain screams and falls in crooked lines.

New flowers have burst through cracks at times
and tender touch has covered slender scars,
but long gone now the glow that filled my eyes.

Calloused hands and numbness try disguising
desire for nihilistic nails in flesh that leave me marred
while rain screams and falls in crooked lines.

With last breaths, while words have lost their rhyme,
know that I would sing for you, my lord, my heart,
though all that kept the glow has left my eyes.

I wish that I could find reason again for life
or taste that made days worth the burning tar
like rain, screaming and felling my crooked spine.

I’ve longed for angels that bring hope or simple lies,
but you have left me waiting between the bars.
Long ago, what kept the glow had left my eyes
and rain that screamed and splintered drowned the why.

A Passion

I’d stand in that coliseum of a church
for hours, my hands outstretched 

to the divine disco of lights, devotion 
lost on my lips, just a fingertip 

short. There were days I worried
I’d always be a second-class

believer, apparently not 
given the highest calling:

a life of endless missionary work
and martyrdom, if I was lucky.

Surely I wasn’t praying enough,
desperate as I was for touch, 

for God, my depression a monument
of the darkness assumed in me.

I wondered why I offended, never 
seen as a glorious sufferer like Abraham

or Moses or Hannah or Job or David
or Paul or any number of saints who

had worn pain like a veil, wondered 
where God went off to when the sun set

for the last time they could remember.
On many short missions, I played

Jesus himself, tattooed and pierced.
One year a white shirt for purity, 

another, a gold sash trailing down
as I created man in my image, watched them 

choose partying, sex, and drugs 
over me, wrestled demons I coached 

in a friend’s living room weeks before.
I cried out, Father! without the Why

have you forsaken me? In my own room,
night after night staring at the walls, 

wondering why I was drunk on this cup 
of immolation, I too called out, finished 

that quote from atop the tree, his body 
sagging until his three-day victory tour,

me laid out, contemplating all that led me to this 
grave of sheets and raw wooden beams. When it was

time for my resurrection, I’d cast the demons
aside with force-like powers. I’d hug my children

and the crowd would applaud. Some would come 
to believe in him, some random day in the park.

But I’d stand there awhile, staring into pairs praying,
thinking about a mistake I made in the performance.

About the Author:

Connor Watkins-Xu holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland and a BA from Baylor University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, North American Review, Gargoyle, Door = Jar, Hawai’i Pacific Review, MAYDAY, storySouth, and elsewhere. His manuscript has been named a semifinalist for the Berkshire Prize and The Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. He has received an Academy of American Poets University Prize and scholarships to the Southampton Writers Conference and New York State Summer Writers Institute. Originally from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he currently lives in Seattle. Find him @connorwatkinsxu on Instagram or connorwatkinsxu.com

*Feature image by Syarafina Yusof on Unsplash