Baptism Alongside Helen Mar Kimball

Let me begin this story where I usually end it:
the amen of a blasphemous prayer, where
I questioned Joseph Smith for all his failures,
the moment where the prophet bends me
to my knees and whispers but I was a man
into the back of my skull but you don’t know
how I loved my people down the front
on my forehead. He meant he loved me too
— I know that much now—from the Lamanite
fury in my face to the awkward dangling
of my brown boyhood. His face flickered
so full of desire I know he needed me, even then,
his face caught mid-smirk, the collar popped
somewhere between statesman and Three 6 Mafia.  
Even after his hard-earned death, he was not  
forgiven, just loved, overwhelmed as I am
now, on my knees again, confused about what
love has to do with Helen Mar Kimball,
his fourteen-year-old wife baptized in a hole
cut from ice. History does not tell us whether
the prophet fucked her, only that she survived
the journey West, married another man and lost
his children. But the prophet had answered
my call. I saw his face. And all my anger was lost
then in that numb river, just as it is now, cracking
its thousand mirrors, the white stream gushing
beneath the ice, so loud you cannot hear
God’s name as they dip you beneath the surface,
so cold you cannot feel the arm that lifts you
frozen into the clean air.