Why Eucharist Makes You Weep, and: Her/meneutics

Why Eucharist Makes You Weep

Of course, your father loving bruteand you precocious child always

wrong. Sometimes at breakfast, he asked you to play monk—silent, head bobbing over cereal

in milky prayer. How hard you triedto make the spoon dip without clank, but your robe’s sleeves

slipped just over the lip. At eleven, you leftit all—advanced reading group, blue group for yellow

home after school for creek hiking, and Godwho gripped the pulpit, chin thrust that thin rush of brash spirit

clogging your young lungs like silt. It was goodto take your leave of these places, holy spaces with holes

so gaping you thought you could hide there.It’s been thirty years. You spit up blood in a therapist’s

office, speak like the kid monk in the kitchen who dumpedsoured milk down a stainless steel drain. Good girl,

you never knew a man except those that splitopen skin, so when Jesus comes to you hanging helpless

head rent to the side at a monastery where monks breaktheir hearts into bread, you see only Someone who continues to speak

to His father, not wood or rostrum, mouths bowedover books, cereal bobbing. It hits you then—He hadn’t

escaped. There are no creeks in the desert no anamnesis,yet He promised his father

      milk, honey on the tongue, a silent spoon.

HER/MENEUTICS

in the beginning was be-kind be-quiet be-a-ladyIn the beginning was the Wordand soft stories humming/strumming/thumbing our wombsand the Word was with Godthe ocean played the guitar to the moon in our deep down bodyand the Word was God.the word was god-in-us/god-on-us/god-neverend-usHe was with God in the beginning.missing in the burning bush blind baby-lessThrough him all things were madefar from the falling foot of that mountain wherewithout him nothing was made that has been made.sand and sea were one because we would not erect the templeIn him was life, and that life was the light of men.in time for the monthly red tent/the morning andThe light shines in the darkness,now our windy wails weigh the Bible down with the wordbut the darkness has not understood it.we cannot say [Elohim] more than us/multipleThere came a man who was sent from Godgod who is not only binary but bisexual bicumbentHe came as a witness to testify concerning that lightreflector on the bicycle to the stars/when I sang to youso that through him all men might believe.I did not use my tongue/when I read out loudHe himself was not the lightit was the text of my spine/my scapula/my sinhe came only as a witness to the light.when we could not write our mothers’ storiesThe true light that gives light to every man was coming into the worldto be tied down/to be textified/fortifiedHe was in the world, and though the world was made through him,eagle-eyed/traumatized our lies alivethe world did not recognize him.and when god said be it was soYet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, binaries begotten/son of sexless motherhe gave the right to become children of God—and we were born slaves to a word before timechildren born not of natural descentbefore cages of lore/born to dinosaurs minotaursnor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.the stories we were too afraid to tellThe Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.of our hands or paper airplanes on the roofWe have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only,

but if there is god she must be the god of plural labia lipswho came from the Father, full of grace and truth.from before we...