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W H E R E W I L L Y O U S P E N D Y O U R E T E R N I T Y ? Aimee Semple McPherson Get here by your own hand. Drive the stakes of a dust bowl revival tent, withdraw the nails & seal Jesus’s wounds. Jesus for the taking! Glor-ay. And you still young enough and pretty enough in your sailor-girl cape & high-button shoes to land all of ruthless Los Angeles at your feet by the thirties. God as trill, as sex toy, theatrical. Listen to the voice in the whirlwind! And cripples swim to Catalina under your scintillant assault. Tumors un-cancer themselves; you build a temple larger than anything else that no longer stands for much here, mortgage it for blonder debts: pin-bobbed glamour. Fox stoles. Scheme timeshares for faithful, flummoxed vacationers, then drift away (though you deny it unto death by overdose and a fatal lack of invitations)  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 69 with a married man in a kidnapping love-nest charade for which Seconal and subpoenas are prescribed. Unrepentant sincerity: a pretty good ending by today’s standards. We’re liars, too, lonely and afraid in ways your salvation seems, some days, designed to cure. Come to the tarrying meeting, Sister! Sixty years in the famous dark— What is this stone, this cemetery angel I cannot wrestle, pinning me here?  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 70 ...

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