God's Love and Nothing Since

It made no sense to me, the fishermen analogy, as being a fisher of men meant catching them against their will, gutting them, killing them, et cetera.

Behind this stained glass window, another stained glass window, and behind that one a mirror which knows how to speak exactly one word to anyone who questions it.

Was the guillotine an improvement on the crucifix or it it hashtag what the fuck all the way down?

Hemlocks swaying in light breezes, scent of something freshening in the earth.

A photograph does not tell a story, it murders a story, and the unethical among us compose new stories from the corpse.

You cannot separate chronology from genocide, don’t even try.

I was fourteen when I realized the way words sounded changed depending on the words around them, and I did not see this in terms of poetry but spell-casting, a confusion that took decades to unravel.

The twenty sentences project is neither an argument, nor a love letter, nor a cartography but a specific kind of plea.

Paisley head scarves favored by my mother, hence my lifelong love of paisley, hence the futility of therapy.

Snow disappears in the meadow but remains in the forest.

I remember once in moonlight watching a fox trot slowly through the field, unalarmed by my presence, which I took then as a compliment, and nothing since has persuaded me I am wrong.

You try to reject Christ and Christ stays, that is how you know it is Christ.

In an earlier draft of this poem, this sentence was actually the fourteenth, and the fourteenth in this draft had yet to be written.

Ursa Major over the neighbor’s barn, the neighbor stumbling drunk with a handgun, mumbling “sorry’ when I approach, ask him is everything okay, guide him back to the house where his wife waits on the back stairs, welcoming him without acknowledging my presence at all.

It’s okay, we prayed on it.

I don’t understand vacations, don’t understand a life one needs to vacate.

What we want most is not to be responsible and what we need most is to accept responsibility, however minor and irrelevant it makes us feel.

John’s blue casket, something specifically cold.

Trying to decide should we dump the sourdough starter, not reaching any answer (which, yes, I know, is an answer).

How I loved the maple trees on Sam Hill Road in spring, the red blush of them on either side of the road, mica glittering in little streams beneath them, all of which I understood as signs of God’s Love, and nothing since has persuaded me I am wrong.