Eira Quinn

They are not.

do not come bloodstained.

They come pressed,

perfumed,

buttoned into power.

They speak softly of duty

while they feed our young

into the furnace of history.

They do not pull bodies from rubble,

or wash blood from a child’s hair.

They do not learn the sound

a mother makes

when the world tears away

what she carried.

They sign,

sanction,

then smile for cameras

and call slaughter

a measured response.

The blade is cleaner

when someone else holds it.

That’s how the worst of us

make butchery

by Eira Quinn

They start with children,

before memory, before choice.

Hell is the first hard lesson:

a child on fire in their mind’s eye,

because questioning meant falling,

and falling meant flames.

Obedience wears a halo

in classrooms where science

takes second chair to scripture.

History is rewritten in the margins:

a 6,000-year-old Earth

scribbled over bones

that scream otherwise.

Love is preached

but never free.

Flags draped like altars,

crosses sharpened into swords.

There’s always an enemy,

always a threat,

always a reason to vote

with clenched fists.

It is programming in holy language.

A long con of compliance

tattooed on the soul.

Greed couldn’t win on merit,

so it cut the roots,

burned the books,

taught kids to vote

like vengeance was salvation.

Their idol came wrapped in gold,

grinned through lies,

spoke like wrath, called himself king.

Louder than the God they feared,

cruel enough to echo Him.

It is a death cult with Sunday school crayons.

And every child who asks “why”

gets silence, shame,

or a slap made of sermons.

So many bright minds dimmed,

free souls folded into fear.

Children taught

to kiss the hand

that slapped them,

then thank God

Love the story where the righteous were saved

and the sinners washed away.

But you missed the part

where the warning came first.

Where the sky whispered what was coming

and someone listened.

We listened.

We built the ark.

Not of wood,

but of data.

Of charts and heat maps

and collapsing coastlines.

We ran the numbers

and raised our voices.

We showed you.

You laughed.

Called it hysteria.

Said the weather always changes.

Said “God wouldn’t let it happen,”

as if faith could float.

We showed you glaciers dying

like ancient lungs forgetting how to breathe.

We showed you oceans rising

like they missed us too much

to stay in place.

We begged.

You scrolled past.

We built the ark.

Recycled, repurposed, reimagined.

We tried to save what we could.

The bees.

The seeds.

The coral reefs,

and rain-soaked forests.

We carried data like blueprints,

warnings like prayer.

We rang alarms

while you rolled coal.

We offered life vests

and you mocked the storm.

This is the flood.

And no one’s steering.

And now,

the water is at your door.

It doesn’t care how you voted.

It doesn’t ask what god you prayed to

while the forests burned.

It just comes.

Not in forty days,

but every day now.

In waves that swallow towns.

In skies that split open.

In heat that chokes the wind.

We built the ark,

but you let it sink.

Something is wrong with the gravity here.

The sky looks familiar

but it doesn’t behave like it used to.

I walk through my day

and everything is functioning.

Traffic lights, emails, polite smiles.

But underneath it all

there’s something very wrong.

Like the world has been occupied

and no one announced it.

I look at people now

and feel like I am behind glass.

Like I landed somewhere

close to home

but not quite right.

Like the rules changed

and no one stopped

the simulation.

How do we keep living

knowing what we know now?

How do we laugh

when the air is still

carrying echoes

no one will answer for?

I don’t feel dramatic.

I feel displaced.

Like my ethics

belong to a species

this planet no longer

prioritizes.

If this is humanity,

I’m grieving it in real time.

And if this is the world,

really,

then the most alien thing left

I would have slept more. Sleep is one of the first languages the brutal world steals from women.

In a kinder world I would have woken slowly. Would have come back to myself without bracing. Morning would not have arrived like a demand.

I would have had more time. Time not spent recovering from the kind of fear that settles in the marrow. Not spent making myself smaller to feel safer.

I would have laughed more from deeper in the body. Might have written more. Might have written differently. Might have made art from wonder more often than triage.

In a kinder world my life would have been ordinary in ways that make me want to weep.

I mourn the architecture of a self that never got built. The confidence that might have grown there. The softness that could have remained un-weaponized. The joy with enough oxygen to become personality instead of brief reprieve.

This is the sharpest sorrow: how much of my strength was never nobility, only adaptation.

I hold grief for her. Grief with a passport it will never use.

People praise resilience too quickly. They do not ask what had to be crushed to make it necessary.

Yet here I am. Alive in an unkind world.

So let this be her elegy. Because she was denied in a thousand official ways too tidy to call violence.

I mourn her. And sometimes— in flashes— I meet her.

Briefly. Beautifully. Before the world resumes.

Dear God, I don’t believe in you, but I grew up knowing your name.

You say “knock and the door will be opened.” But it’s not a door, it’s a courtroom. One where the judge already knows my name, and the sentence was written before I ever spoke.

Your people— They wear your name like a crown and wield it like a sword. They shout about life but leave no room for the living.

I’ve seen what they do in your name. How they twist scripture like barbed wire and string it across voting booths.

I’ve seen the prayers that come with policies. The grace that stops at borders and bathrooms. The mercy that expires when someone says they’re gay.

I don’t believe in you, but sometimes I want to. Not the judge in the sky with a gavel and a grudge, but someone better.

Because if you’re real I need you to be more than judgment and power. More than the smoke machines and slurs. More than a verse quoted while they pass the bill that kills someone like me.

If there is a heaven,

let it be soft.

Let it be quiet in the right ways.

No shame behind the silence,

just space enough to breathe.

Let it smell like rain

on warm pavement.

Let it sound like your own voice

finally saying

”you don’t have to try so hard anymore.”

Let there be laughter.

The belly kind.

The kind you forgot how to have

when survival became a second language.

Let it be a place

where the queer kids

dance without flinching.

Where the men feel and

never have to explain.

Where the women aren’t saints or sinners—

just people,

finally allowed to rest.

Let it be a garden

no one gets kicked out of.

Let the water be clean.

Let the air be kind.

Let no one call it holy

just because someone else can’t enter.

Let it be a place

where no one is hungry.

For food.

For touch.

For safety.

For love that doesn’t expire

when you doubt.

Let it be

the apology the world never gave you.

The hug no one thought you needed.

If there is a heaven,

let it be this:

No gate.

No throne.

No final exam.

Just a light that says

“I see you.

I know how hard it’s been.

Come in anyway.”

That sensitivity

is strength

and softness

is rare.

But I’ve lived long enough

to know it’s also

a burden.

Even joy

is sharp.

Beauty

makes my chest hurt.

I see something lovely

(a child dancing,

a tree lit just right)

and I ache

because it’s fleeting. 

I’m always a little

too full.

Like my heart is a glass

half-tipped

in a room

with no steady hands.

Everything hurts

just a little.

But I’d rather feel

too much

than feel nothing at all.

But god,

sometimes

I wish there was

an easier way

to be here.

I’m told in heaven sorrow is impossible. No grief. No mourning. No pain.

And when I asked What about the ones I love? The ones who didn’t believe? The ones you say are burning?

I'm told, you won’t remember them.

Or worse: you will, but you won’t care.

And that’s supposed to be paradise?

To forget the people I’ve cried for, fought for, built my life around?

To stand on golden streets while their skin melts below and feel nothing?

That’s not peace. That’s something worse.

———

And So They Made Him a God,

by Eira Quinn

In the beginning,

there was a woman.

She bore life with her own hands

and fed the world from her body.

She built shelter from nothing

and filled it with heartbeat.

She was the origin story.

The fire. The flood.

The first word.

And they hated her for it.

Because how do you conquer

what refuses to be claimed?

So they called her dangerous.

Carved her voice into silence.

Burned her wisdom with her body

and named the ashes sacred.

They took birth

and called it a curse.

Took her image from the heavens

and replaced it with a man on a throne.

Because it was easier to kneel

before something that looked like them.

So they rewrote the beginning.

Said HE made the world.

Said HE breathed life into dust.

Said woman came second—

from a rib, no less.

And just like that,

the one who created life

was made into a footnote.

But some of us remember

the stories written in stretch marks.

The hymns sung in lullabies.

The truth buried in our bloodlines.

We remember

that God was a woman

before they rewrote the script.

And no matter how loud they preach,

how hard they pray to the sky,

the earth still knows

I annotated my work with the biblical texts they’re talking back to, plus additional commentary.

It’s there if you want to follow along while you read, if you want to come back to it after, (it's also cool if you just want to keep your own interpretations to yourself). Whatever you need.

Oh, and there are reviews from a lot of you from here and Goodreads! i used first name & last initial for privacy (unless you gave me permission otherwise), but I’m more than happy to update it if you want a more specific credit or less, or none at all.

Appreciate you guys! 🥰

Add up the hours we’ve lost to fear, delays, barriers, medical danger, burnout, grief, and “workarounds” for basic rights, across everyone alive in the U.S. That’s what they took. Time. Life.

Not just this administration. It’s been going on for years, mostly Republican administrations dragging us backward, and the rest managing the fallout without giving us our lives back. If you add up what’s been taken across all of us, it’s a lot..

10 million people × 10 hours = 100 million hours

100 million hours ÷ 8,760 hours/year ≈ 11,415 years

That’s 114 centuries… from a conservative estimate.

by Eira Quinn

What better way

to make people stay

than to threaten them

with eternal pain?

They say it’s justice.

That love can be proven

through fire.

But ask yourself:

What kind of god

creates children

with soft hearts

and open hands

only to burn them

for being human?

What kind of mercy

damns a soul

for asking questions?

What kind of justice

requires forever

to punish a moment?

If love must be feared,

is it love at all?

If salvation means silence,

who does it save?

If hell is the price

of being alive,

then your god

makes monsters

They told me about Noah,

but not the bodies.

Not the screaming

beneath rising water,

or the mothers

who begged God for mercy

as he watched from the clouds

and said nothing.

I heard about Job,

but they skipped the bet.

The part where God let the Devil

ruin a man’s life

just to prove a point.

Killed his children.

Stripped his skin.

And called it

righteous testing.

They told me about Abraham’s faith,

but not Isaac’s trauma.

Not what it does to a boy

to see his father raise a knife

with heaven’s approval.

Not the silence that follows

when you survive a god

who wanted you dead.

No one mentioned the concubines,

the raped,

the forgotten wives,

the daughters sold

for the price of land

or peace

or power.

They didn’t talk about

stoning disobedient sons,

or killing gay lovers,

or what to do

if a woman is not a virgin

on her wedding night.

They said Jesus died for us,

but not that God

could’ve chosen forgiveness

without blood.

That maybe the crucifixion

wasn’t salvation,

but spectacle.

They said “trust the Word,”

but they handed me

a censored book

and a list of acceptable questions.

And when I asked

about the rest,

they said

“have faith.”

But faith without truth

is just fear

in nicer clothing.

And now that I’ve read

what they skipped—

now that I’ve seen

what they hid—

I can’t go back

to coloring pages

and quiet amens.

The god they taught me

was edited.

Redacted.

Rebranded.

But the truth?

The truth was always there.

In the margins.

In the footnotes.