How does a hometown harlot make it
into the Bible? Is it the perfume
of her hair, her salt tears, maybe
a family connection to history?
She is a daughter of Eve by default
as we all are supposed to accept.

She knows all the men in town, 
what they prefer. Her mother cries
at what her daughter does to help with the bills.
Her father and brothers shun her. So many 
details left out, her story brief, circling back
back to Golgotha with the other Marys.

But maybe she doesn’t even exist, 
minor character invented by men 
to make themselves out as generous, 
dropping the stones from their hands, 
skulking away home
to their wives and children guilt-free.

Yet she knows them to be as we know 
of some today, violent and without ruth, 
men who let women bleed
in parking lots while the seed sewn 
into them decays them from the inside.