Salt

You can read Salt in its entirety in The Fiddlehead Issue 308. 

Angela of Foligno (1248 – 1309) colours her lips unsparingly.

I fight with my older sister over the bright blues, the shimmering eye shadows I paint over my eyelids. My sister considers it to be in the service of an expected suitor, someone who would witness it and recognize it as a mark of my devotion. Initially I had no understanding of the way my sister described this relationship, could imagine no one I might make myself blue for.

Years later, I sat down with Angela of Foligno. Smearing deep blues over grey eyes and a sentimental lipstick called Barbara to outline my mouth. This is the ritual I created in order to be given language, to receive the words in my mouth. To be able to name.

Angela.

I have been led by the lives of women. At a yard sale in the part of town with no curbs to separate road from home, I came across a trailer. The trailer was not for sale but I asked about it anyhow and found that the owner, after many years of considering it as a possible home, still only used it to store mildewed towels, Mexican blankets that towered high and blocked the light from coming in. She sold it to me, having never put it on the market, for $800.

I parked it in my older sister’s yard, a modest cliff overlooking the channel that separated me from the rest of the country. On the other side of the channel were mountains that contained the land with its peaks and valleys. Here it was only the birds who kept me company: a raven pursued by two crows flying in concentric circles above me, sometimes landing on my sinking roof.

Here I sat down with Angela, the blessed Angela of Foligno who is consoled by the deaths of her mother, husband, and children. Having commenced upon the Way, those around her become her only hindrance, and the only objection, to the marriage she most desired.

Angela, whose joints become unstrung when the host is raised.

Angela who wishes to keep the eucharist on her tongue, had she not heard that one must swallow it whole.

Angela, who stripped before the crucifix and offered herself naked to Christ, pledging eternal chastity. I am Yours and Yours only.

Angela who smells a sweet fragrance emanating from Christ’s corpse, after finding herself in the cave where he was buried, kissing his chest and working her way to the mouth.

When Angela is graced by a vision of Francis in the arms of Christ, she screams unintelligibly and is asked never to return to the basilica at Assisi.

Angela, who hears Christ expressing the need for fusion, not fleeing our physicality, when he whispers to her: “Your whole life—your eating and drinking and sleeping and everything you do in living—is pleasing to me.” Sucking on Christ’s wound, Angela knows she will not be allowed to drink his death, to imitate his martyrdom—though at least the wound keeps her lips a sharp hue of scarlet, for her time on earth.

An obsession with colour, the evidence of my nourishment. The full colour on my lips that shows I have drunk from the cup.

Sitting alone in my trailer, I consume the saints one by one, holding each freely in my mouth with great delay.