#scraphims

This is a free verse work about my SA and religious trauma.

[poem text: boy who arrives lacquered in cerulean hush, as though the sky had forgotten a scrap of itself and folded into his marrow. boy whose mouth tastes of saltwater hymns, brine-bitten and sharp, the language of shipwrecks and sirens and sailors’ last lullabies. boy who is not the ocean, nor the sky, but some fugitive between them, the pigment saints once crushed lapis lazuli for, precious and ruinously expensive, holy only because it cannot be imitated. boy who lingered in the interstice between phantasmagoria and premonition. once upon a time a moth landed on his wrist and mistook the pulse for a lantern; it stayed there long enough to die. /end poem.]

[poem text: he laughed into my mouth once, and i thought it was the church bells. i watched the priest break the bread. we drank from the same cup, his lips on the rim where mine had been, and the wine was too sweet, almost syrup but definitely sin. we ate in silence, in the same way devotion breaks you—slowly, without mercy. he smiled and there was a crumb on his lip. i wanted to be that crumb, dissolving in the cathedral of his mouth. later in the day, we worshipped each other. leftover wine was traded back and forth until my tongue could not tell if it belonged to me or to him. he said my name like a blasphemous psalm—again and again, until i broke. breath against my neck, he whispered, i think you love me. and i said, no, i am only starving. this lie was easy to swallow like him. i heard the old sermons crawl back into my skull. the ones about want, need, greed, and gluttony. and yet i wanted him more, wanted him whole, as if communion was not enough without flesh still warm. at night, i did what any good believer does when their prayers remained unanswered. i killed him with my bare teeth, but i think i died first. /end poem.]

The gospel according to a candle - 12.2.25 by @scraphims

How foolish, to have once expected catastrophe as though collapse were the only midwife of beauty. I waited for apocalypse and missed the divinity in breadcrumbs. Let me forsake cataclysm and kneel before the quiet dominion. If I am to burn, I must first love the kindling, the candleflame, the nearly-nothing. To ignite is not to explode but to bow before the spark, to see it and say: behold, here is beauty, and it is enough. /end poem.]

[poem text: when i was younger, i learned the word democracy uncle sam promised me freedom should i kneel before the flag should i memorize the pledge should i keep my head bowed when the anthem drowns out gunshots. i thought knowledge would save me he told me that an educated citizen was a free and liberated citizen. at fourteen, i learned about the jurisprudence of shelby county v. holder about racial packing and redlining how committees cloaked in procedural jargon select subcommittees whispering the new shape of power they carve precincts open like pomegranates but i, too, am stained with this red. the system is of deferral promises postponed until they rot. he told me: wait, be patient, change takes time wait for the old men in suits to grow younger. but time is the very instrument of delay a scaffold built not for us to climb but to keep us dangling just below the window. the machinery hums and feeds on the red of the new maps and the red that we continue to spill all around the world through apartheid. i did not vote in a democracy i voted in a cage painted to resemble one liberation was never on the ballot. and still they sell the myth that patience will deliver change that if i wait one more cycle, one more census if i pour my body into one more march i will inherit freedom. nobody can give you freedom it must be taken. snatched like bread from the table of kings seized like land from the earth itself. /end poem.]