Someone Saved My Life by Magin LaSov Gregg

Someone Saved My Life

Nightfall, Cori and I drove from Maryland
to Mississippi, listening the whole way
to Elton John, past yawning Virginia farmland
& Georgia’s red clay hills
headlong into Alabama,
where I thought I saw Jesus
trailing us at a gas station,
altar-bound, hypnotized.
At 23, I was surviving. I was waking up.
Fly away, Elton sang, as if leaving
could be simple & we could all be butterflies
fleeing the lure of our chosen cocoons.
I didn’t yet know the difference
between running away and running toward,
but I needed to unstrap
from an electric chair disguised
as first love, pale substitute
for the mother I lost too soon,
whose ashes I hauled around in a black box,
and refused to scatter,
evidence of the wreck
I was making with my life.
Elton, risen from his own cruel crosses,
glimmered like a god
lighting those dark forests of my twenties
with sequins and starshine,
the fellowship song offers,
another kind of faith.
His lullaby voice sparkled like moonlight
on a velvet curtain & put my illusions to bed.
In suffering, I was neither unique nor alone.
Saviors came in many forms ––
prophets, roadside Samaritans,
Cori, an undertaker’s daughter
who refused to let me sink into the grave.
We coasted into Jackson on Easter morning,
daylight breaking through slate clouds,
no need for church, freedom a hymn
I’d just begun to hum.

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Magin LaSov Gregg is a neurodivergent mother and poet living in Frederick, Maryland. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Gettysburg Review and other venues. Poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Offerings: A Spiritual Poetry Anthology from Tiferet Journal.