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You remember finding him beautiful and wondering what that made you, to want a holy man, to look upon the pastor and silently pray for forgiveness.
You know the moment you are alone with him, seconds after your parents take their leave. Your mother slides a paper fan into her purse, your father eases the double-doors shut, and you feel their grief like an eternal bruise.
The angel studies you. His eyes are molten and alive, his body a compilation of contradictions.
You run your hands beneath his buttoned shirt and find the gnarled scars above his shoulder blades. What was it like to lose them? you wonder. What do feathers smell like when they burn?
who forged your inhospitable body into a livable vessel.
You, who is called seduced and seductive, sacrifice and punishment.
The angel kisses power into you. He tastes like ash and pomegranate, like smoke and apple tart, and you wish to know what flavor he finds in you. “Honey,” he says, so suddenly you shiver. “You taste like pollen and nectar and Eden.”
You are a kaleidoscope in his arms, in this church, and you can’t help the sound bubbling behind your teeth.
Hot breath coasts across your trembling mouth, and he says, “Look at how you’ve grown.” His thumb works at you—your clit, your cock, your becoming—the place where your body has entered its own version of manhood.
Being with him is like speaking in tongues. You are out of control, flooded with holy, holy, holy, eager for anything, everything he has to offer.
“God’s image failed you, but I have made you mine, made you perfect, made you glorious. It’s true, is it not?”
Grief struck him like lightning, jaundiced him; hollowed him out like a river through the bedrock.
half-drunken on shame, half-sobered by fear.
She thought of the bees that nestled between the petals, their wings crystalline under the sun. They did not worship the nectar; they were themselves divine.
“I love you,” he said. “Paenitet,” she replied. “I don’t.” Then she brought the axe down over his head and made a clean ending of things.
Elia let Dani overtake him; he wanted to be consumed.
The image was so holy that Lot’s wife turned to salt, an offering to the angels whose warning she ignored, when instinct drew her eyes to destruction the way a tongue is drawn to the gum where a tooth used to be.
there is only so far a person can run from doubt.
Abel stared in shock. He had been the one to provide it, but it still baffled him. An angel had just devoured an almond butter granola bar. It had contained raisins. It did not feel divine.
Abel understood well that holy love was both pure and terrible.
It felt like magic. It felt like forgiveness. It felt like redemption.
offering him softness and comfort in the face of his impossible grief.
If you don’t look, you’ll never know.
Masterpiece They whisper And you fall apart for them Again In an act of devotion Is this not Divine?
But what if you did make something? What does a damned creature have the urge to create?”
Most of creation has, in many areas, unraveling and unmaking. Decomposition to enrich the soil.”
It’s been so long since I was connected to God, even when I’ve spoken to Him in Heaven, that I’ve forgotten. I remember all else, except His love.”
“When I was going to overdose on opium, you were the only one there for me.”
The force that in doing evil does good. How remarkably droll. God could really be so predictable.
“I hate you sometimes,” the man says, and their next kiss has teeth.
This is a human thing, surely, ruminating incessantly on the past. And yet, what do fallen angels do but sigh and ruminate on old wrongs?
His last words needed no elaboration. I hate you.
a phantom ache in your caged chest; longing throes as you wonder – what we would be should she be of me and never leave.
Hymn hums in your atrium chest, sinew strung tight as fates’ golden thread; silence springs saliva in your mouth, sour taste pooling upon your tongue.
bones buzz with cicada song.
You kneel, wrung with sweat in mire, tarnished and blistered and human
quenches your lungs’ roots with brisk ozone, sweet sharp along tongues. Their teeth scythes your lip, split harvest from this pit of a mouth –
Summer shine ruptures, all swallow’d you raptur’d in their embrace, divinely devour’d, body burst, bloomed, built beyond HIS image. Adorned flesh sculpted into Spirit – you, bitten and bruis’d fruit, holy.
Hungry eyes ate at him, consuming each piece of muscle and meat he had on display. They paid for the ability to sink their teeth into his smooth skin, ripping a chunk out to chew on. They left him dead and bloodied every evening on the stage, covered in his own sweat and the lingering smell of rubbing alcohol.
Honey poured out of Jesse and the man’s eyes drank it up.
The tissue disobeyed the restraints of his skin.
He curled his arms inward, turning to cradle himself on his knees, stretching the canvas of his back taut.
Any thoughts he had were tangled, unreliable, he couldn’t trust them. He rubbed the man’s back slowly; the only sign of forgiveness the man needed. The man jumped on this moment and continued to eat at Jesse’s neck, his fingers dipping into him, reaching for absolution.
His wings were new and so they were wet.
Heaving gulps of air, he began to understand the exhaustion that came with flight and freedom.
with each swallow his scars softened. Every tear stitched together his own wounds. Every drop of blood fallen from the man replenished a drop of his own.
He smells like salvation.
the Lord has damned you to chase love in until the end of time
The devil says, I let myself fall, believing you’d catch me, but our archangel has not spoken in centuries;
and in your lovely, vicious heat, my coaxing fingers at your gate, I think there is hell, inside of you
