Poetry
You Are Lilith
Rise.
Lift up your countenance;
embrace the sacred flame
burning endless within you.
Ascend on blackened wings
to assail the heavens.
Cast down god from his
cruel throne. Behold!
you are Lilith. Behold!
you are unbound.
Where I'm From
I’m from letting go
of all hope for a better past.
I’m from I
who restoreth mine own soul,
from discovering light and divinity
imprinted within me.
I’m from defiant hope
and healing—
rejecting the audacity
of our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’
insistence
that this is all we’ll ever be.
I’m from the Fool,
boldly stepping forward
on perilous paths
toward destinations unknown—
knowing that even if I die,
I first yet lived.
I’m from seeking stillness,
tracing spiritual lines backwards,
and untangling the knotwork
of generational curses—
getting to the root
of all this debris.
I’m from the healing arts
and the Lefthand Path,
cleansing and exorcising
spirits and people
drawing out the worst in us.
I am from choosing myself.
The Dividing Li(n)e
Lost in the Mail
There were days I wrote you
out, dropped you like a feather
and ran. I’d hoped to leave you
behind me, but you were my
favorite quill. The very worst
of my Hell.
I always come back for you,
to dip you in the murky eyed
ink called memory. Even now,
I write your name across the
breadth of these wrists, hoping
to set free all this bitterness.
Some say I keep your ghost
alive in letters left by your
graveside, but this ink
reminds me why I left home—
to exorcise you and them
from my bones.
Microfiction
'Til We Have Faces
She whipped around, the scream still ringing in her ears. “Rachel? Rachel?”
The room fell silent. Her legs knocked against tables and chairs in the darkness. “Rachel? Rachel! Where are you? Please! Rachel!” Her stomach lurched and twisted. She abandoned all caution, all discretion, desperate to find her sister. Something soft caught her foot. She stepped back and cast the light from her phone towards the object.
Rachel’s severed face stared up from the floor, her body nowhere to be found.
Deep State Files: The Vaccine
I was forced to receive the devil’s juice just before it was released to the public. I was part of a Deep State Disinformation Task Force sent to undermine the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine. We knew Hydroxychloroquine was effective against COVID-19, but we needed the public to buy into our “vaccine.” What we were given wasn’t the same as what we gave the public. We had all been deceived.
Days after I received Beelzebub’s Bottom Sweat, I began seeing things—people—no one else could see. I heard things no one else could hear. A collective tortured cry seemed to persist in the distance, always lingering just over the horizon. Soon I was visited by a strange being that revealed the “vaccine” had sealed my soul for the great archangel, Lucifer.
In exchange for my soul, the being had imbued me with the ability to see through the veil and into the lands of the dead. All I see, all I hear, are the tortured souls forsaken by God, a perpetual reminder of what awaits me in the next world. Everyday, death haunts me. It looms over me with the promise of hopelessness and despair.
My body has begun aging at an accelerated rate. The only things slowing the acceleration are COVID-19 boosters and the crushed skulls of aborted fetuses. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would have gone outside at the height of the pandemic and licked every handrail just to prove to science that God rules and the devil drools!
But I can’t go back.
All I can do is tell my story and hope it might save you.
Ask Jesus to come inside you and leave the devil at the door.
Is it?
The gun rang out.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Four shots tore through her chest. All five feet, seven inches crumpled to the ground. Blood soaked the moonlit shore as the lake lapped at her flesh. The boy stood, tears streaming down his cheeks, gun still trained on the fallen woman, breath caught in his throat.
“It’s over.” He exhaled.
“Is . . . it?”
Her body convulsed, bones snapping out of place, limbs twisting and elongating. She rose like water and held him in two fathomless pools. Her jaw popped and jerked, unhinging itself, mouth stretching unnaturally wide, revealing row upon row of jagged teeth. The dead woman bellowed a scream so primal the boy collapsed to his knees, sobbing.
“No need to cry, boy.” Her voice was like a skittering swarm of roaches. Her laugh like an electric guitar. She towered over the child and whispered, “Now, come to mommy.”
Essays and Reflections
Ten Things I've Been Meaning to Say to You (Christians)
Dear Reader,¹
If you identify as a Christian in present-day America, especially a member of one of the many flavors of traditional Protestant or the Protestantized American Catholic church, these are 10 things I’ve been meaning to say to you:
1. Love was never negotiable. Jesus didn’t include caveats or escape clauses when he told you to love your neighbors. It doesn’t matter who came after, whether J. D. Vance or St Augustine, Jesus could not have been more clear when he explained to the young lawyer that your neighbors are the human beings you share this world with. Yet, I have watched you bending at every wrong angle like contortionists trying to justify your cruelty towards those who live and love differently than you. You’ve crept into every wrong place to kick down doors where Jesus would gently knock.² You wield love like hate and wonder why so many of us reject you—we’re not persecuting you, we’re setting boundaries because we are tired of being struck by the hands you can’t keep to yourself.
2. Before you shout, “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” I’d caution you to read the text a little closer. The order and pairing does not preclude other orders or pairings, but if you insist on a strictly rigid literal reading, I will remind you that the first lie uttered in the Bible comes from the mouth of God.³ Feel nervous? See how you’re ready to reinterpret something about “spiritual death” into the text despite the language leaving no room for you to do so? Your negotiations, consolidations, and reinterpretations establish orthodoxies your texts can’t sell. The Book’s voice is far from univocal, so perhaps, find what works for you and leave us to find what works for us. After all, it was Paul who told you to “work on your own salvation with fear and trembling”⁴ –not ours.
3. The Rapture is not biblical. It is an invention of the nineteenth century. When the world collapses under the mess you’ve made—I promise—you’re going to die right next to the rest of us. Side note, the Apocalypse of John is not a prophecy; it’s apocalyptic literature. Look it up.
4. “The gays” aren’t coming for your children. Drag Queens aren’t grooming them either. The trans woman is just trying to use the bathroom, she’s not interested in your daughter. The argument is a distraction meant to make you overlook the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of documented cases where your pastor, your priest, your youth leader, your deacon, your elder was caught in the pants of your children. Stop letting your leaders project their sins onto others. Rise up and clean house! Remember, Jesus flipped the hell out of some tables and got a little crazy with a hand-braided whip. You might want to try to be more like him.
5. But being like Jesus means letting go of the ideals of meritocracy. It’s funny. You say Jesus loves, forgives, and saves freely, but the moment we try to give free lunches to starving kids or shelter the homeless, you’re the first to accuse us of being socialists. Look, if Jesus who was neither were measured under the standards of capitalism and socialism, my hand to the gods, you would accuse him of conspiring to triple “D”⁵ your beloved billionaire CEOs.
6. I think you forgot you can’t serve God and money.⁶
7. Many of you have convinced yourselves that forgiveness is delivered upon request, regardless of the tone or intent with which it is requested. Many of you have convinced yourself that forgiveness requires no work, no reparation, no repentance, and no consequences for your actions. You conflate forgiveness with access as if forgiveness removes the boundaries we erect to keep ourselves safe—from you!
8. Stop throwing rocks at your brothers and sisters who have the stones to say, “I think somewhere along the way, we’ve gotten a little off course.” Of course, it is hard to admit you’ve taken a wrong turn in a system that insists on its own perfection, but listen, heed their words. Every prophet God sent to set right his people got axed, too.⁷ For the love of God, learn something from your Book, stop repeating the same mistakes.
9. Paul didn’t write the pastoral epistles. They’re regarded as forgeries. Eject them from the canon already.
10. At some point, you must take accountability. Not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing refers⁸ to charity. It wasn’t a call to ignorance. Look in the mirror. See what you have become—not becoming but have become. Something’s wrong. There is a cancer metastasizing, spreading, and killing everything that made you Christ-like. Seek treatment now . . . before it’s too late . . . I hope it’s not too late.
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1. This is an essay I wrote for class. The assignment was to write a “list essay” using Jason Reynolds’s “Ten Things I’ve Been Meaning to Say to You” as a mentor text. What follows is the result of that assignment. Enjoy?
2. Revelation 3:20. Now to be fair to this verse, it refers to the church in Laodicea. The author bears witness to a letter written to a church that is “lukewarm” and will be rejected by “the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation . . .” Even as this church stands to be cut off, the letter writer knocks and calls with the promise that if their voice is heard and a response is made, then the letter writer will “come in and eat with (them), and (they) with (him).”
3.Genesis 2:15-17.
4. Philippians 2:12-13.
5. This is a reference to “Deny, Defend, Depose,” the words etched onto the bullet casings found at the United Health CEO’s murder scene.
6. Matthew 6:24.
7. This play on words refers to a story found in Acts 7.
8.Matthew 6:3.
Digital Notebook #1: Cultivating Genius Ch. 3 Reflection
Identity is composed of notions of who we are, who others say we are (in both positive and negative ways), and whom we desire to be . . . Our identities (both cultural identities and others) are continually being (re)defined and revised while we reconsider who we are within our sociocultural and sociopolitical environment. Idenity is fluid, multilayered, and relational, and is also shaped by the social and cultural environment as well as by literacy practices . . .
-Gholdy Muhammad, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy (Scholastic, 2020), 67.
Who do our students see reflected back at them in the classroom? If identity is the dynamic dance between who we think we are, who others assert we are, and who we want to be, what music are we as educators using to facilitate this dance for our students in the learning environment? What does our lyrical content, rhythm, tempo, and melody tell the learning community about itself–or at least, confesses what we believe about it? Do we create harmony and space to build beautiful life-affirming crescendos, or do we play a cacophonous discord of developmental harm?
Arguably, identity is at the heart of the matter in the ongoing battles over curriculum and information access (i.e. book banning) in public schools across the nation. Curriculum that provide opportunities for students to “deeply know themselves and the histories and truths of other diverse people . . . ” and to learn “about the cultures of [others] . . . ” so that they might know “how to respect, love, and live in harmony with others who don’t look or know the world as they do”1 is under fire by those who have enjoyed a privileged identity reflected the archaic imagery of what once was considered the national identity.2
Some laws and political stances, such as those in Idaho, Tennessee, Florida, and other states, both reinforce the archaic national identity and its privileging as well as argue for a position that students are to wait until “college or adulthood to discover self for the first time.”3 These same practices suggest that student identity is defined solely by students’ parents or guardians until they become adults. These practices harm students and produce emotionally and intellectually stunted adults. While being emotionally and intellectually stunted and lacking a sense of identity is ‘fine’ for those insisting on such laws and practices, it is unhealthy and harmful to our students.
Within every classroom, a set of educational standards and objectives are laid out. The goal is literacy. By literacy, I mean more than reading and writing. I mean literacy as “connected to acts of self-empowerment, self-determination, and self-liberation” and the accumulation of knowledge and the use of skills “as tools to further shape, define, and navigate their lives.”4 However, “[before] getting to literacy skill development such as decoding, fluency, comprehension, writing, or any other content-learning standards, students must authentically see themselves in the learning.”5 It is vital that students see themselves as equal partners in an educational experience that aims to help them develop into educated and fully realized humans, rather than passive spectators gaining skills from the leftover scraps of those who have been privileged to be active participants.
This requires that I, as an educator, must first see my students. I must discover who they are and the assets they bring to the classroom through their diverse backgrounds, languages, and experiences. Every student carries with them “funds of knowledge”6 that can be leveraged to their advantage. It is up to me, and all educators, to tap into these funds to better reach and teach our students. Moreso, we can use these funds to reflect our students back at themselves in the classroom in ways that both increase their literacy skills and allow them to further develop their identity.
The music I wish to orchestrate in my classroom is one that will facilitate a healthy dance between the intersecting elements of identity. As my students learn to critically evaluate Texts,7 apply logic and reason, question, challenge, and build up the tools with which they will transform the world, I want them to see themselves and others through a lens of humanity. Some might argue that recognizing culture, language, gender-identity, ethnicity, and race are counter-intuitive to a human centered lens, but these fail to understand the multifaceted elements and experiences that make us human.
Likewise, these elements inform us of the conditions and experiences of others–allowing us to take note and intervene when the life and well-being of our fellow humans are placed at risk. To be honest, I believe that it is the fear of our students’ understanding of humanity that motivates those who argue against our students’ access to education and information.
Education is liberation, and liberation threatens the status quo; it disrupts the power structure. If our students learn to authentically see and understand themselves, defended by a bulwark of education and literacy, then they will be much harder to control. They will be less likely to accept the identities thrust upon them by others. When students see themselves in the curriculum, when they discover how literacy can give shape to their identities and understanding of the world around them, I theorize they are more likely to buy into the work it will take to ultimately empower them to create their own paths and forge their own destinies.
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1. Gholdy Muhammad, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy (Scholastic, 2020), 67.
2. The national identity is composed of the myths, legends, and edited stories of the United States that portray white Western, Judeo-Christian ideals and white men as the Paragons of America. Non-white and non-cis-heteronormative people are considered “lesser” or “less than” American when compared to white, cis, heteronormative, American men. This is reflected in cultural dog whistles, state and federal laws, policies and practices, and our societal institutions. Several texts are available which explore this issue in great detail, including: White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Dr. Robert P. Jones, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Dr. Heather McGhee, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, and Pedagogy by Dr. April Baker-Bell, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, et. al., and many others. (Yes. I have read all of these texts, and I strongly recommend them them.)
3. Muhammad, Cultivating Genius, 67.
4. Muhammad, Cultivating Genius, 22.
5. Muhammad, Cultivating Genius, 69.
6. Norma Gonzales, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Household, Communities, and Classrooms (Routledge, 2005).
7. By “Texts,” I mean capital “T” Texts. Texts refers to more that just the written word. It referst to all media, information sources, systems, policies, practices, life scripts, and every medium by which we come to know ourselves and the world around us.
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