“
Now reading
god
At my beloved’s burial, I can’t see his body. Only carnations. I hear your name and my beloved’s in the same sentence I didn’t come to meet you whose men are everywhere, calling themselves your body singing about their own beautiful blood which I’ve never seen but am willing to bet isn’t as beautiful as my beloved’s jacket, full of his skin cells and waiting to reincarnate from a Goodwill medium rack. In the room of my beloved’s body, no pictures. Only carnations. They spill over his box like misplaced grief. Underneath them he dances with strangers at a gay bar two hours from town. Unbuttons his uniform in a desert barrack an ocean from town. Leans on his red Bronco smoking through relief in the middle of town where too many exes are watching the club door. Lord, in the room of my beloved’s body, your men won’t admit the fact of his body. In the foyer, one room away, a decade-old portrait of him in pearls and a black dress, his expression proof your goodness doesn’t extend where it counts, the stories I hear about my beloved as mistaken as your miracles. Lord, when I loved you, I didn’t know so many of your men would exile so many of us. When I was ten, I wrote volumes of letters addressed Lord and warned classmates about the rapture and called televangelist hotlines for assurance the devil’s lava wasn’t waiting beneath sleep. Later, my beloved took your side in debates about your existence. If he was right, you owe him a confession. Tell him how your body wouldn’t take your advice, how its right hand severed an entire demographic. Look at him, in his new eyes. Say what you can redeem, and won’t.