I think I’m having revelations.
God will not allow me to love.

From the first strawberry blonde to the last chemical cut,
I’ve felt as though I must repent for the love I fall into and climb out of.
Queerness has a funny way of holding that over me.
It’s been two years since I last had to confront this thought, though nothing has changed.
I still can’t go to church or touch myself for the same reason.
The love of God, hallowed be thy name,
the invisible shadow of candle smoke lingering between pews,
the warden suspended in a sunbeam through a stained glass window,
the all-consuming doting I’m asked to consume, like emaciation is even an option.
It’s this love that pickles me in a brine of my own sorrow and misery,
both real and imagined.

It’s real, that God loves me the way maggots love flesh,
that I love God the way baby teeth love gums.
What’s imagined is my capability to love someone despite both.

My friend has accidentally reeled me in, her tenderness somehow a fish hook in my lip.
She's the girl I eat dinner with every day, who wears bathing suit tops as shirts, who texts me at
11:11, not because either of us necessarily believes in the divine numerology behind it, but just
because we want the other to be able to make a wish.
Maybe one day her’s will be for me. I waste my own wish on the very thing.
But in the meantime, I spend our moments together taking in all that she is while the skin under
my makeup and clothes burns with jealousy, embarrassment, rage, and something worse.

I’d rather call it hunger than admit it’s something else-
turn my heartache into stomachache, fold at my waist, grip my sides, and swallow.

But to keep from starving, I can’t help but notice
the way her hair scrapes her shoulders,
the way her lips pout when she’s idle,
the way she crosses her legs no matter where she’s sitting.
She never catches me looking at her because she’s never looking at me.
I can barely stomach it.

I notice the way her glasses somehow don’t slide off her nose when she tilts her head down.
And when she tilts her head up,
when she’s sitting on that hallway floor and looking up at me,
all I can think about is grabbing her chin.
My teeth are sharp and she’s so soft. Not just her silken smile or rounded edges, her insides too-
practically made up of bruised fruit and forgiveness.
I want to take a bite.
I just want a taste.
But that satisfaction is something I'll never allow myself.
If she is my communion, something to swallow whole and let dissolve all the evil inside of me,
there would be nothing left.
Instead, I starve and hollow myself out just to walk around like this,
relying on sins to fill my cup.
All seven overflow down to my elbows and pool at the draping parts of my sleeves.

So in the name of gluttony, I don’t stop myself from imagining.
I imagine tucking her shoulder-scraping hair behind her ear when it falls in her face.
I imagine inhaling the exhales that pass through those forever frowning lips.
I imagine uncrossing her legs one day, if she lets me.
She won’t.
The flush in my ears and the tear in my eye give it away.

But that’s where it stays, tucked away and crowded up in my imagination.
It festers in all the other shame I've harbored since I was a kid, maybe 7 or 17 years old,
a gift only God could’ve given me, to be able to hold so much innocence and guilt,
both real and imagined, turning me green and thinning me out.

It’s from this divine revelation of commandment to damn myself that I’m summoned to cage it.
To burn it.
With dirty fingernails, to bury it.
And six feet under, in the same blessed coffin I keep everything else I love,

I let it rot.

Amen.