"Raptured" by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose

At the first news of pandemic,

thinking this might really be the end.

Finally.

And in that moment feeling like a fish                                

released from rough and awkward hands,                         

arcing into the silk envelope 

of a stream

weightless.

Like when I’ve been dancing, spinning 

in heated centrifuge

until the body’s layers 

separate                              ripple out 

or after the three Manhattans it’s taken 

to strip the thick veneer of surface, let  

the mirror slip and puddle at my ankles.

But all that relief short-lived

more like after the water’s skin

accepts the penny thrown at it, slight

disturbance, momentary flutter

then still again

every              wish                     swallowed

because though I’ve tried

I never could shed

the inherited corpse, 

the sarcophagus of flesh and bone,

couldn’t unzip myself from its thick-

walled tenement, abandon it 

drowned at the bottom 

of some baptismal tub.

Maybe the pastor should have held me 

under longer. Maybe the problem 

is I have been all surface, sins 

that should have weighted me

instead keeping me

afloat.

Surfeit of nothing.

Anchoring paradox:

At once all body

and nobody

because whether you starve it

or pour all manner of things into it

you still have to believe a body matters                 

that its weight on this earth is worth                      

inhabiting                                           

even when the earth itself isn’t worth                    

inhabiting because it’s going to fall                          

away soon, too.

All those days I came home 

to an empty house, neighbors not 

answering my knock, no one

picking up the phone I convinced 

myself all the good people 

had been raptured, lifted like air.

And me?

left behind

weighted to the earth 

because I was never 

any good

at being good

so when my mom walked through the door

balancing groceries on her hip 

and the neighbor’s Chevy growled 

into their drive and the phone vibrated

against the wall, a boy calling, 

I resolved to be better 

one way or another

to weigh less

Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose (she/her) is the author of two chapbooks: Wild Things, (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Imago, Dei (winner, Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize, 2022). Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Sun, McSweeney’s, Lunch Ticket, Verse Daily, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Awarded the 2025 Betsy Colquitt Poetry Prize, Elizabeth teaches writing and gender studies in Rochester, NY where she also leads trauma-writing workshops at the Breast Cancer Coalition and serves on the board of Just Poets. Elizabeth reads for Trio House Press.

Written by

Share

Copied