Trickster Gods Play Games with a Fourteen-Year-Old Girl

The school trip form says
fifty-five dollars. Yesterday
it didn’t mention money.
She cannot grab the paper
from her father without risking
the backhand she will get
anyway because of the cost.

She skips breakfast daily,
her stomach a bull-necked bouncer
refusing entry to anything
before eleven, on pain of acid vomit.
She replaces lunch period
with an AP class, one more
gleaming key on the ring
that may turn the tumblers
on the locked wrought-iron gate
to anywhere-but-here.
Her waistline thickens anyway,
ignorant of laws surrounding
calories taken in and burned.
The boys she doesn’t want,
and the one she does, sneer.

From her knees, her first offerings
to the priest safely settled
behind his darkened screen
are cinderblock silence
and the capsaicin disdain
perfected in teen girlhood.
She turns them over like pearls—
her small, precious lusts,
the hate banked deep that heats
the breath in her blooming pink lungs.
She opens her mouth to say,
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,
but what trips from her tongue is
I earned my sins and
I won’t sell them for free.
She tries again for the pretty lie,
her words replaced with her truth
as they touch air: I don’t want
your god’s salvation, old man.
Give me a golden apple.