Darkly Devotions

Lyric prose meditations that play with elements from evangelical Christianity, Buddhism, yoga, reiki, Tarot and “weird voodoo shit.

~by Cindy Clem

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Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endures to all generations.

~Psalm 100: 4-5

Thanksgiving exercise:

Stand in the middle of a room. Raise your arms and head toward the ceiling. Laugh. Open your mouth wide, and laugh as loudly and as deeply as you can. Keep laughing, even if it sounds fake (it will sound fake). Laugh past the barking discomfort, past the feelings of lunacy, past the part where you scorn yourself for buying into this stupid exercise. Laugh until you feel the laughter rising from the bottom of your spine, until your cells begin to vibrate, until you can’t stop laughing because now it really is funny, although you don’t know what ‘it’ is, until your face is wet with tears, until you begin to fear that you will never be able to stop laughing even though your life kind of sucks right now and you don’t want the universe to see that you’re laughing because laughing feels like a capitulation, like an admission that you can take the crap and still be okay because you have “a good attitude,” “an attitude of gratitude.”  Speaking of gratuitous attitudes, you might as well laugh out the contempt, too, the contempt you feel for preachers and teachers and motivational speakers and everyone who used to make fun of what they called your “sour face” as if mockery were a cure, as if you were pouting and not just thinking solemnly about something or imagining yourself falling down the stairs or a gun held to your head. Laugh like a gun is being held to your head. Laugh until your face begins to break apart, until the vibrations split your skull into pieces that float around the room while light pours forth from the place on your neck where your head used to be. Laugh until you are nothing but voice and until the voice too has shred into strands of light and now what’s left of you is on the floor, broken, silent, replete.

Okay, that’s enough. Pull yourself together. Set the table, bake the tofurkey. Remember the words of Leviticus 22:29-30: And when you offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Lord, offer it of your own free will. On the same day it shall be eaten; you shall leave none of it till morning; I am the LORD.

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Cindy Clem received her MFA in poetry in 2005 and has been writing non-fiction ever since. Her poems and essays have appeared (magically!) in Mid-American Review, The Normal School, Prairie Schooner, Memoir (and), Superstition Review, The Interrobang, Spittoon, and Michigan Quarterly Review (forthcoming).