In certain folktales, she appears with Mary,

pierced through with the scissors and needles

of girls who worked, forbidden, on Sundays.

She is marred with knives, and scarred

with scythes wielded disobediently.

I imagine Christ’s gentle hands, healing

his battered Saint, pulling nails from her flesh,

gauzing over the wounded, bleeding breast.

As when I lay on a gurney before surgery,

my eyes fixed on the nurse’s crucifix.

As long as I could watch Christ’s hanging body,

I was calm; and in that brief and conditional

courage, God came and erased fear’s bruises

from my neck and stayed with me, who wept.