Articles

I was fine with the ceramic statues of Mary, flaming heart jumping out of her chest. I liked the bright blue robe, gold stars, and shell-like halo of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But the big wooden crucifixes, that crown of thorns digging into Jesus’s brown locks, skinny white arms yanked above so that he’s pitched forward—they spook me the way Dracula spooks me.

Prayer is silence, / spirit-bones and soul-blood fluctuant as breath.

I wanted to break down part of the Gospel story. As I see it, it’s not just about the son sacrificing himself and all those dynamics that inform the biography. I wanted to look at the messages in the Gospels that haunt our lives. What would we do in this world with someone who could perform miracles—verifiable, right-in-front-of-your-eyes miracles? It would just blow the top off the joint. But at the same time, I’m sure we’d find some way to commodify it.

I remember you in your final atonement, how calm you were. 
Though you couldn’t tell me, you understood the names hidden in the dusk. 

Such is the mule, muscled with self-knowledge,
wiser than Aristotle.

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley on an east Pennsylvania rite of passage.

The voice of your brother’s blood 
is crying to me from the ground.

As a child, I would write letters to god, then fold and throw them behind the wardrobe in my room, as if it were some sort of divine void.