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“Regnum caelorum will submit to force Assailed by warmth of love or living hope, Which overcome the claims of God’s own will, Not in the manner that men beat down men But win because will wishes to be won And won, wills all with all its own good will.” Paradiso, 20.94-99 Bitter sweet names, pickle…

Come into my asbestos heart, insulated from your alabaster heat. Come into inflammation, suppuration, infected limbs of distrust and of hate. Come into decimated populations, burnt and charred by radiation. Come into hard prison halls, to silent cells with lonely souls. Come into the freezing snow, to the child buried underneath, denied all love or…

lowland hum buzzes Inside these time capsuled pages, missing the heart I saw once here. Is this why I have run from you? Refusal to stick my hand into the wound? You want to see and not believe, put words in Jesus’ mouth. You want the last words set as loss, humiliation. Cannot parse the…

December 17: Sometimes I feel like being Christian means that God needs me to perform well. To be kind. To be pretty. To never screw up (I screw up a lot. A lot.) To never feel a negative emotion. To have no needs for anything, to make no demands. To be, essentially, a high-functioning robot.…

Midafternoon, there comes a post-meeting lull. The tasks of morning domino to a calm conclusion. I open the work refrigerator. A sandwich rolled in paper napkins, wrapped in a blue New York Times plastic bag, causes me to smile. Whose sandwich is this? I wonder. Although scrappy, its wrapping project thoughtfulness, something purposefully brought together.…

Erase me slowly— with great care— scrub each fold of skin with warm, unscented water rinse clean your acid septal wall. Habbakuk moans on the asphalt seam of grass. And weeps for a vision that has long since disappeared. Above him soars two vultures, licking their calcified beaks, leering, longing for his sores. A prophet,…

He is the first-born of all creation: in him, all things hold together, we sing on the feast of Christ the King. Oh you are Lord, and your will will be done. I beg in the same breath: your will be done, be free and Remember me. Save yourself from this pain that we have…

before I went to bed, I made you a poem. And I thought: I should write this down. I’ll forget it in the chaos of the nighttime business of dreaming. I won’t forget, I promised. But I woke up today, remembering only I had promised you I’d write. And not what went unwritten.

I lie awake in bed and wonder what will happen to me after I die. On the ceiling, a ticker-tape litany of saints rolls by. Not the kind you hear in church on Easter Vigil but the 2019 vintage. The college friend killed in the car crash. The other college co-worker killed in the car…