A Few of My Failures

Soccer, my dad was a coach and my sister a natural athlete; I had two

left feet and didn’t make the team.
And math word problems were so confusing. Mr. DeMarco always had

spittle in the corners of his mouth. I couldn’t concentrate

on all those numbers.
And being Laura’s friend. She was smarter than me, but shy and quiet.
I made Russell Nelson moon her on the playground at lunchtime and then
I never spoke to her again.
And keeping a diary, although I loved that little book with its Holly Hobbie
cover and tiny lock and key, I only wrote six entries the first year
and two the next. All the other pages are blank,
but I wrote about loving Ted Trainor. He rode his moped to my house

after school. He wrote me poems and cried when I broke his heart,

too afraid to tell him what was happening to me.
And having faith only meant that I liked singing the hymns
and the quiet rhythm of sitting and standing and sitting again.
But I couldn’t believe Jonah was able to breathe in the belly of that whale,
or that someone would choose to die for my nameless sins
thousands of years before I was born.
Then there were those babies; four of them, dead before fourteen weeks.
Scraping and scooping the lining of my uterus

in the sterile operating room
was not the same as eulogizing their lives,

standing next to an open grave.