By Adele Elise Williams

I thought the nuns would be wilder, that they’d grab their breasts,
flick their tongues. I imagined their habits above their heads,

their pink parts singing in the sun. Before that, I’m talking to L
at a dinner table for artists and he tells me about his daughters,

how the youngest is “very high energy” and I say adoringly,
“She’s your wild one!” and he says, “I don’t like to label my daughters

as one lesser than the other,” and I thought what is this square-ass
fucker talking about. Before that though, I’m sick. I’m on a ridge.

I’m thanking God for the height. If I could choose one natural thing,
it would be landforms. This is when I start reading about the nuns. No!

Actually, before the sickness, before the ridge, I’m by a river and half
a coyote hangs above me in a tree. I want it. I spend an hour poking

into the tree-sky with a stick longer than a truck. The book about the nuns
sits by the river, and once I score the coyote carcass I start to read.

When I was a little girl my mother made me so mad primping for mass
I’d yell, “If you love God so much why don’t you just marry him!”

Twenty years later, when my life sank like a river boat wrapped in flames,
I researched monasteries and forgiveness and celibacy and divine betrothal.

Oh the way we full-circle! How round-about our discontentments become!

The nun-novel says a lot about reformation and heretics and transcendence.
Story goes, the Mother Superior grew bored and lustful. She imagined

the deviant parson’s slender fingers on her thighs, his beetle-black curls
on her breast. Safe as milk. Soft as a sandwich. The Superior could not let it go.

Before reading the nun-novel, before the ridge, before the sickness, before
the half-coyote, I paint all my easter eggs red and slip a secret inside each one,

a line of language with no narrative tether. I give one to you and one to you
and one to you. On three we open the eggs. On four we pray. There is no five.

The Mother Superior grew ashamed of her libido, feigned possession
and blamed the devil for the erotic depravity. She was not the only one.

Jesuits performed exorcisms, shoved fingers into mouths, administered
holy water enemas. The nuns rolled around on the floor like poisoned opossums,

screaming like rats under the street. The Superior jerked her body ten times,
stood upright, and grabbed for the Jesuits’ heat.

There is something to be said for setting sail, for faking it until you’re there.
The provocation of exasperated effort, how the play goes on until it doesn’t.

Before I painted the eggs red I had to buy them and before I bought
them I had the idea. Ideas come from our heads and hearts, so, our souls.

Descartes says the soul is a thinking thing, and before everything
was a thing I did not know so I did not do. Penultimately,

I think the nuns were on to something clutch about devotion, about
rage. In conclusion, the red eggs were red.

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