Current Issue

Sure, I’m bitter. I’d love a stab at The Uppercase Truth, at real verisimilitude vis-à-vis the material particulars of evangelical culture from roughly 1948 to the millennium.

I think about those days a lot. Youth. Closeness. When we were still in God’s grace, still believers. I miss so little, and so much, about those days before we grew up, before we left the church.

They hung the sign on the country road just past the field where the scarecrow prays. White letters screamed against blood red tin: “Turn right or be left behind.” The gravel cracks under hesitant tires. Some obeyed- signal blinking like a confession. They follow the curve into neat little pews

the cars pulled out of the Catholic Church one by one the people inside their bellies full of Christ nostrils still burning from the curl of incense absolved for today safe from sin until the wolves stir tomorrow and the next they quietly wait for Sunday

Let what is dead remain dead- no longer a distorted creature that hides under my bed. Broken promises in a book I’ve read, a prayer a million times I’ve said. Let the people from my past stay there, never to darken my home so bare keeping hostage all the secrets

We are all just sinners in the hands of an angry god at least that’s what you said. I broke my bones trying to bend to your will or what you said was the will of God. All I want is holy perfection. I reach but my fingernails can’

You’ll never ask, but I forgive you.

Looky there, he said and pulled off Route 68 by a steel girder skeleton: God’s Ark of Safety, Being Rebuilt Here.

I’ve spent decades unconvincingly, unsuccessfully, asking you to leave.

From the artist: “I grew up and put childish things away. I always knew that if I wasn’t a Christian, I would be an Atheist. I find it much easier to be Christ like now that Christ isn’t involved.”