Killing the Buddha | Online Literary Magazine

Ash Blessings

by Ashley Makar | February 22, 2023 | psalm

No need to profess a thing.

It’s Ash Wednesday, and I’m excited. Not because I like to dwell on death. I just love ashes: the fire and matter, this rite of passage, this riverboat of living and dying we’re all in.

As far as I know, drawing the cross in ashes on foreheads is the only unconditional ritual of the church. You don’t have to be ordained or even baptized to give ashes. And to get an Ash Wednesday blessing, no need to profess a thing: Just receive, in a dark smudge, the dust-to-dust of us, the particles of stars on your skin.

This afternoon, I’ll receive ashes on the New Haven Green, then offer ashes at the hospital where I do two shifts a week as a chaplain. I’ll walk around the ICU, the cafeteria, the psych

11 Questions: Heretic: A Memoir by Jeanna Kadlec

by Briallen Hopper | 11 questions, 11 questions

Restorative, queer, unfuckablewith.

The Balm of Proximity: Churchyard Haunting Past, Pandemic and Potential

by Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson | damNation, KtBlog, mag

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?

Emily Mace places flowers at the memorials for the 7 killed in the Highland Park parade shooting. Photo credit: CNN Politics

Flowers for Fireworks

by Emily Ruth Mace | dispatch

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

by Philip Metres | KtBlog, mag, psalm

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

by Emma Cieslik and Emily Suzanne Johnson | dispatch

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

by Rebecca Ramdhan | KtBlog, mag, psalm

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

by Joe Gross | KtBlog, mag, psalm

Sometimes
multiplication
of loaves
just means
splitting
one loaf
between
two people.

Poems for the Cruelest Month

by Francesca Hyatt | KtBlog, mag, psalm

All of the intensity and unpredictability of this season, the surges of hope and terror, the stirring of memory and desire—word images, symbols, and sounds arranged in rhythm, engaged in elegy and mystery may be our best bet for helping us hold it all.