I.
It’s true. Once she feasted from the fat-streaked dish the sea bream’s head, the lapping brine,
the nightly wish, the seeping dread, the need to intertwine,
the coin-gut fish, the broken bread, the muddied, bloodied wine.
II.
After the thing on the hill, she went into the desert.
Her clothes fell off.
Her hair covered her body.
They’d ask her
is it true, what we’ve heard about you?
And they’d try to get a closer to look
to see if her hair tumbled over her shoulders
like a mermaid’s or sprouted
from her gaunt flanks like animal fur.
She’d offer them a dab of ointment, and point at the sky.
III.
Magdalene wiped the blood from his feet with her hair. She had always known it would be useful one day
So long congealed with iron, slaughter. After they took him down, she would not wash it.
She touched the ointment to the places
on her wrists and ankles where a nail could sink.
Touched to her brow where a circle of thorns could rest, touched herself till she levitated.
Her body rose up over the valley of dry bones over the interstate the oil fields
where rigs drank like giant storks over
the palm trees the cement factory the orange grove.
At dusk her body
Caught the last light.
Her hair fell slapping in the wind like a dark flag, holding the last of his human smell.