The Mud of Us
Grief calls for outlandish acts of love.
In swells of grief I address the dead as you. Over 12 years ago, my dad called from the ICU, with fluid collecting in his lungs. Before we hung up, it was as if he mustered all the wind left in him to say, “See you Saturday.” By the time my flight arrived in Birmingham, his heart had stopped. For forty days, I wrote him a letter everyday. Whenever my words faltered, I scrawled See you Saturday, over and over.
I’ve only seen tears fall from my dad’s eyes twice: when his sister died, and after our yellow lab mix Sandy passed. In my dad’s Egyptian culture, men don’t grieve pets. He called my Alabama grandmother to ask, “Is it ok to cry over a dog?”
Sandy’s ashes sat on
Holy Thursday Pop-Up Foot Clinic
Listen while two feet soak.
Ash Blessings
No need to profess a thing.
11 Questions: Heretic: A Memoir by Jeanna Kadlec
Restorative, queer, unfuckablewith.
The Balm of Proximity: Churchyard Haunting Past, Pandemic and Potential
If a religious building is in itself a threshold…what possibilities are uniquely latent in the threshold’s threshold…what wisdom lies on the church steps, in the side alley, in the far corner of the graveyard, on the margins, and nowhere else?
Flowers for Fireworks
The Highland Park I knew blurs with the Highland Park that so recently was, and yet the memorials that frame the ends of this street reveal the Highland Park that we will yet be.
Plague Psalm 19
Bees needle our sin-stung flesh in your hive
Yet some kind of sweetness
still touches the tongue.
What Wondrous Love Is This: Finding Queer Religion in Muncie, Indiana
We expected to hear about shared experiences of homophobia and isolation, but much to our joy and surprise, we have also heard, time and time again, about how our narrators have found and cultivated communities that affirm the lives of queer people.
On Gratitude
But there was love, love, love,
dripping from our hands.
We both gripped the sharp edge,
and it was painful
Two Poems by Joe Gross
Sometimes
multiplication
of loaves
just means
splitting
one loaf
between
two people.
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