Raising. Rising. Lifting.
The foul and desecrated cup.
Despised and despising.
Infernal hells now bear them up.
Wicked tongues now contend
To shatter souls by misleading.
Toxic words will they bend,
Poison masked in gentle seeming.
Make war and put to death,
The gods of these accurséd men.
Make nothing of their breath.
And to thy God—their souls commend.
Stir and rise, lowly Fool,
Let your wisdom be their folly.
Drive back the hellish ghoul
With fire and flame and volley.
A curse upon my father’s house,
And on men such as he
Who in cowardice do espouse
To stand in God, mightily.
In them you’ll find no might.
Neither find you any wit.
They claim prophetic sight
And build up gods from shit.
I dedicate this poem to far-right American White Evangelical Christians everywhere. May you die as you have lived, and may your God treat you as you have treated others.
You hold who I was, frozen in time. He is but a corpse no longer among the living. How far has he journeyed from you. How much more has he become.
O, how watchful have I been to see you unmoved. Settled like silt along the banks of fetid waters; deeply rooted like thorns underfoot.
Here we stand. Host of the dead and I. Bear you now your arms, for neither can live while the other yet draws breath. Come and find my vanities forespent.
A bloated body
Floated gracefully by.
Swollen and buzzing,
Swarming with flies.
Its eyes like milk.
Its skin a mottled grey.
Adorned in silt
On a bright summer’s day.
Slurs are a slurry of swill.
Urine and feces
Served at wine tastings.
Their bottles are fermented.
Ours are fertilized.
Drink up.
It’s poison,
And we’re all gonna die.
Forgive all this white noise.
It’s just my religion.
A holy mission
To put women back in the kitchen.
Because I need a sandwich in this man’s world.
So break out the casseroles,
And there better be raisins
In that potato salad.
We conquered the world
Just to dump its spices into the ocean,
Like tea
On a balmy Bostonian day.
If we can’t handle it,
No one gets to have it.
White pride.
It’s a precursor to genocide.
We’ve shackled dark skinned bodies
And forced entire cultures to die.
Go ahead,
Write it down, it doesn’t matter,
We’re burning entire libraries alive—
With all the great works still inside.
So drink up—
To the new world we’ve civilized.
Or, colonized.
Shout out to Jesus Christ!
The first time I saw a ghost, I was a small child lying in bed. Overhead in pitch darkness, her light drew near and retreated–drew near and retreated–in unnatural rhythm and pattern unrepeated. It wouldn’t be the last time some strange and inexplicable thing I’d encounter. Twenty years later, I’d reach out for disbelief to be shattered in the thrill of hearing, “Holy God, help me. Pray!” I have not yet shaken the chill, still riding my spine.
It’s made to look right, and at first glance it does, but on closer inspection something seems off. One can’t quite put their finger on what exactly is wrong, but the sense of wrongness only increases and never fades. It’s like the uncanny valley or the verisimilitude of the thing comes too close to replication, but its otherness invites primal fear and revulsion to the surface. Something in the heart and soul plead with the mind not to believe the eyes, and, yet, neither can one look away. To blink is to give opening for the sinister heart of the unsound thing to strike.
The veil between worlds unfurled itself and lay open like a door before him. Beyond was the grey space. A muted world where lost souls and marauding spirits linger or hope to find passage into the land of the living. Crudely, a place he called the Deadlands.
He had never come across a doorway through the veil before. The idea seemed impossible, but perhaps, if spirits and souls could slip between worlds, it might be feasible for the process to work the other way around.
There was a hesitation in drawing near the doorway. He had seen through the veil, communicated through it, even banished beings back into it, but never had he trespassed into the Deadlands. What would happen? To him? His physical form?
He took a step forward and paused.
They were sick. Always sick, it seemed. Their withered and pale forms with skeletal outstretched limbs reminded him of molted and diseased birds—almost alien. But he knew they were human. Like those before. All children, and all abandoned by their caregivers.
It was as if this disease, or virus, or whatever the hell it was taking healthy thriving children and twisting them into malformed mockeries of humanity had somehow managed to reflect the hideous nature of the uninfected. Entire communities had resorted to simply turning out these poor souls. Leaving them to die in the streets, or in the wilds, or wherever the most convenient place be for them to die.
Even those left to wander aimlessly in community spaces were ignored and given wide berth by the uninfected. Their cries for mercy falling always on deaf ears. They had always been among the most vulnerable in every society, and now even their natural guardians refused them. Choosing, instead, to insulate themselves from that which might take their healthy children.
Healthy, of course, being a relative understanding. After all, how healthy can one be whose soul has been seared? What soundness of mind can there be in those unwilling to work to end the slow, agonizing, deaths of their children. Society has never been so unhealthy.
Humanity had managed to lay aside its humanness. Whatever the cause—political affiliation, religion, social philosophy, etc.—didn’t matter in the end. Humanity had lost itself, and he was left to do the only humane thing left.
Other men joined him in corralling as many of the infected into a single sobbing cluster of suffering. Malformed and twisted though they were, their fear was unmistakable. He wished there were more he could do, some greater kindness he could offer, but instead gave them the only thing he could give; mercy.
At once, streams of fire spewed out over the children. Night after night the same torment, their pitched screams shattering parts of his souls like glass. He wondered how much of his soul even remained intact.
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