Where I’m From

I’m from letting go
of all hope for a better past.

I’m from I
who restoreth mine own soul,
from discovering light and divinity
imprinted within me.

I’m from defiant hope
and healing—
rejecting the audacity
of our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’
insistence
that this is all we’ll ever be.

I’m from the Fool,
boldly stepping forward
on perilous paths
toward destinations unknown—
knowing that even if I die,
I first yet lived.

I’m from seeking stillness,
tracing spiritual lines backwards,
and untangling the knotwork
of generational curses—
getting to the root
of all this debris.

I’m from the healing arts
and the Lefthand Path,
cleansing and exorcising
spirits and people
drawing out the worst in us.

I am from choosing myself.

Beautiful Crow

The sky is a polished blue,
wearing her softest white clouds.
She makes love to the sun in front of God
and everyone.
The earth blushes
in brilliant emerald breath
held beneath sapphire eyes,
and yet,
it is the lonely cawing crow
with whom I sympathize.
Its call,
ragged and worn,
lingers in the rhythm
beating inside my chest,
trying to make sense
of a world so big,
yet so small—
like humanity’s capacity for love
and its proclivity to hate.

The Science of Smaller Plates

—a commentary on evangelical diet culture and its assault on women.

Smaller plates
mean smaller meals.
Smaller meals
for that smaller you
because they told you
the best you,
the ideal you,
God’s design for you,
is a smaller,
lesser,
wasting away you.
A smaller you,
they say,
is a prettier you,
a more fuckable you,
and a more fuckable you
is the whole reason
God made you.
A holy,
fuckable,
baby making you
because if men
can control themselves
around you,
then you are failing
to honor the purpose
god gave you.

Letters to the Dead

There were days I wrote you
out, dropped you like a feather
and ran. I’d hoped to leave you
behind me, but you were my
favorite quill. The very worst
of my Hell.

I always come back for you,
to dip you in the murky eyed
ink called memory. Even now,
I write your name across the
breadth of these wrists, hoping
to set free all this bitterness.

Some say I keep your ghost
alive in letters left by your
graveside, but this ink
reminds me why I left home—
to exorcise you and them
from my bones.

The Prophet to the Pastor

In the hard places where bread
becomes stone and crowns
become thorns, there I wander
the palm lined pathways, leading
to the debt you have yet to forgive.
It is exhausting trying to keep up
with you and the nails you drive into
the hands holding out for mercy.
I suppose Grace is just a name
you give your daughters to pretend
you do all this—for Jesus.

But in spite of it all, I still wander,
smuggling in an orchard where
bodies no longer burden the
outstretched olive branches I offer
to those whose backs I buried
beneath broken boughs and
splintered words.

Someone has to sweep the
manger clean. You never know
what displaced souls might need
to rest, like an infant pauper king
held in the bravery of his mother’s
breasts, or a Palestinian leper
just trying his best to survive
the brutality of a Gaza stripped
of its rest.

This world is too hard. We have
forgotten how to make room for
love to thrive. We salt the earth and
examine splinters with wooden eyes
underneath the neon glow where hangs
a miracle whipped Jesus, who holds
a sign that reads: ‘God is love, but he
has his bad days, too.’ If what
you say is true, then God has just as
many bad days as we do.

There has got to be a better way
to make our days brighter—
like bringing in more chairs
and making room for everyone
at the inn, or finding ways to love
the face of God staring back at us
through the eyes of our neighbors—
every neighbor, not just the ones
who gather on cute sing-along
Sundays. All of them. But especially—

especially the ones we’ve crucified
in full view of the Son.

Ode to Calvary Chapel

The Moses model was established to give the pastor
complete control because Chuck Smith did not like
to hear the word ‘no.’ And so followed suit his cult of
imposter pastors who wielded power accountable ‘only
to the Lord.’ Such a strange interpretation falling outside
all models for the Church, but for them, it worked—to
keep the flock in line. Under-shepherds too quick to
identify with Jesus and not the Judas in themselves.
I condemn it. The bath, the water, the baby—all of it.

Strange were the men, never women, who assumed
the role of pastor. Charismatic, arrogant, filled with
all manner of pride, but—they say—holy, and to say
otherwise, was to Divide—division is the greatest sin you
can commit outside of being gay, or a woman who lost
her virginity before marriage; these men were always in
our pants. They were always in our lives pointing our
eyes to distant stars while picking our pockets for their
con—Jesus is coming, they still say, and every earthly
strife is a sign.

We waited. We watched. Jesus never showed up—to
a single Sunday service. Probably because they did
so little serving beyond themselves. Riding the coat
tails of every Evangelical pearl clutch, they stoked the
fears of the flock inside the lines drawn in the sand
between them and everyone else—us versus them.
Them, a euphemism for non-Calvary Chapel believers,
the unsaved, the unclean, the Black, the Brown, the
Other—and especially the misfits who were a misfit
for the cross-shaped coffins they’d stuff us into, like
Lonnie Frisbee who first brought the youth. Lonnie,
who gave Chuck his start. Lonnie, who they threw
away when he couldn’t stop being gay. Lonnie, who
Smith and Laurie claimed repented on his deathbed.
We know they are lying.

Chuck is gone now, I wish Laurie was, too, but his
legacy lives on in the broken bodies beaten down
by illiterate men who use the Bible as a weapon, God
as a scapegoat, and Love as reason to hate. And there
was so much hate.

I condemn it. The bath, the water, the baby—all of it.

We Are Yet Ghosts

We speak like ghosts to keep alive
the cemeteries buried in our throats
because, even after all this time,
there are still some things we are not
yet ready to let go—like the hatchet
we use to open up old wounds. We
confuse mausoleums for museums
where in place of paintings we hang
like criminals. Our skeletons are on
full display, broken and unclean. Both
of our hands are bloody.

While you’ve lingered in that old house,
haunting its halls like a presence known
only by trails of sunflower shells and
the phantom drones of imaginary flight
patterns, I have clawed my way through
the dirt to rise above the earth to find
my way from death to life. I do not yet
know if it is too late for you, but I have
exorcized your demon from my soul,
and one day, hopefully, I might finally
let go.

Horror-Things

I imagine horror-things. Not horrible things, those
I don’t have to imagine, but horror-things. Things
that skitter in deep shadows, or tap on the glass
of the window where the pane is reflective of
something deeper, or the late night shifting of
dishes in the kitchen–it should be frightful, but
instead, I just feel less alone.

This head is too full of ghosts. Not the movie kind,
but the you kind; the you and them I’ve tried and
failed to leave behind kind. The you and them
reminding me that the dead don’t rise, that there
are no clean getaways, and that none of us get
out of this alive.

So why

do I have to feel so prematurely dead inside?

Silence Fell

The first time I found the courage to ask questions,
I placed them sideways, set them crooked because
I was too afraid to shoot straight, so I chose to shoot
like a star—cascading across heaven.

But your fluency in crooked was limited to speaking;
hearing was never your strong suit, so when—in the
midst of our firefight—I finally said the quiet part out
loud, clear as a bell, you stood still, and then everything
got very quiet.

A Tired Mom

God’s not dead,
She’s just tired
Of all this Hell
We put ourselves through.
It was never meant
To be like this,
The hurt.
But like so many new parents,
She’s still learning.
She’s still growing up,
So be gentle,
Because this
Is new for all of us.
We are all
Making this up.
So, please,
Let go of the guilt
Held hostage
Over your hearts,
Because someone
Has to teach God
How to let go of a grudge.

A God to be Pitied

Ought God be feared?
Or pitied?
To have formed us
In divine likeness,
She sought to love herself.
She tired of being alone.
So from the dust we arose.
And we
Could not make her happy.

So what then is God
If not abdication
And abandonment?
A damning silence
From beyond the stars
Watching our suffering
With such knowing.
Listen,
She is begging
For our forgiveness.

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The Inevitable Introduction

These are the ghosts that wander through the infinite corridors of a divergent, and admittedly, unsound mind. Some belong to a troubled past, others arise from social decay, while others are utterly fabricated. I speak them into being, bring them out for examination, and in doing so, unintentionally examine and critique myself.

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