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 ^{(it's beta!)}

A patient-advocate on the radio talks about poetry as healing with a voice that gently twangs to my Aunt's house in Rocky Mount, North Carolina i haven't seen her preach in years or her in maybe as many The radio acknowledges that poetry can challenge not just go to a place of beauty "beyond the hospital ward" and my plate collecting aunt once hid according to legend, from the KKK Guiltily, I assumed her voice came from her long-repaired hair lip though since several times a local-flavoured voice has unknowingly chided me with flattened consonants, but always with delicacy

My God walks among us, and he is beautiful.

I had my first religious experience three summers ago. The summer was warm, the air more burnished than bright. Heat in North Carolina is flat, like a hand pressing, and close like the walls of an oven. My God's arms are pale to translucence, and when he wears a t-shirt you can trace blue ropes of muscle and vein up until they vanish a handspan above the elbow. They grow behind his sleeves, wrapping under these sacred cloths to his shoulder and spreading unwitnessed to his core. I was unordained. In the green and air-conditioned temple, I watched and resented as he and his acolyte drank of their water of life from blue and white aluminum cans. It gave them wings.

They spoke in tongues, and meanwhile the rest of us who came to learn at that temple felt earth-bound, stutter-tied in comparison. I saw what they could do, and I wanted it to be mine. Studying at that temple became my passion, and with time I learned to take my own wings. The temple had accepted me as a neophyte. But I was not his acolyte. I worked as far and long as I could, for two years I tended the temple as his assistant. He would not have me at his side, or under his wing. Like a Lieutenant Napoleon in an army of lions, he stood as alone as he cared to, short and proud.

So I went into surgery on December the Twenty-Third. Just as the last ceremony of the year was winding down inside the green temple, and as the ball dropped over Times Square, I pulled off a bandage and saw. My eyes were blue. My eyes, which had been somewhere between the third day of snow and bathwater, were his blue. I never wanted to close them.

When I came back to the temple, my God had tendered his resignation. He had maintained the temple for it's owners, but wanted to find a new path. I couldn't go back to surgery until he was gone. I didn't want to waste any moment I could spend studying his perfections. They were myriad, and I wanted to know all of them, from the exact angle at which he held his head to the visible texture of the crook of his ear. It looked like an apple coated in wax, shiny and unreal, too smooth and shaped. I never touched it.