Me and Margery Kempe on I-90

My traveling companion, taking this

Pilgrimage through the earthy Holy Lands

With me, she calls herself “creature” daily.

She weeps and wails and gasps through tears.

She tells me I will sin and sin again.

In layered, patterned, shapeless clothes,

She talks to angels, hovering at a

McDonald’s, off a highway exit, past

A suburb where the worthy and wretched,

She gasped out, shop side by side, and in the

City, crowds watched her shaking as she

Stood, transfixed, having visions of His True

Passion. She smells like candle wax and long

Stale sweat. She eats by binging, never drinks.

“And surely Sodom’s fate awaits this place,”

She tells the air, her forehead resting on

Seismic bus window glass and I just nod,

As if to agree, like she spoke to me.

She says that people do not like her much.

Though I, myself can’t stand her long, I do

Not tell her so. As sometimes, I see it—

In her reflection shown in the gray steel

And glass of some clean buildings we walk past:

Encircled on her head, a spike-wrought crown

And dripping from her hands, the reddest blood.