She Shoots, She Mourns • • • Liah Argiropoulos

60,000

Jordyn Baker

I am driving seventy miles an hour as my car shifts from fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to sixty thousand total miles screaming to a megachurch sermon my already-charred throat praying for its repentance

I coast down a pitch-black backroad in secret suburbia wishing I could wear the costume of the sufferers in that congregation I further seventy to seventy-five and at eighty, I skip to a punk rock riot anthem my mother’s Ford would be foreign to I am begging for God in the unholiest of states

I thought I asked God to stop; I told him to meet me in a still-morning-dew-soaked field for the last time or to go while he still could young and pleading for a force to sit with to roll in this grass with and once I had proof it was God, to whisper in his ear that I never doubted his existence

We were to laugh in bliss and he was to cleanse all that made me unrighteous I was to collapse at marvel

But God never came I sat in the dew and cried over my wet denim and broken fate God left me alone in the grass and in disobedience

I am at eighty-five now and maybe God is in the smell of old hay creeping through my broken air vents or maybe he already left this place I shuffle back to words of praise

I am bawling empty verses and hoping my hands find some form of evidence under a steering wheel cover with obvious forms of arrogance from a stumbler who held onto the fabric too tight

A lost sheep that strayed from the ability to plea but saw Jesus once in this very backseat because babe, you look best on your knees you look best looking up at me

Ninety miles per hour I have never driven this fast