center

We passed through the alleys with our sweat-soaked backpacks, past ten live chickens in a single cage, past animal organs soaking in red vinegar preservatives, past smiling grandmothers sitting on the same stool they’ve sat upon for two hundred years.

I learned early that “rebellious” actions and opinions weren’t welcome. By 1968 when I started church high school, I was indoctrinated with sexual shame, self-examination and repentance, and placing the “domestic sphere”—marriage, homemaking, motherhood—above serious plans for a career.

Revelation begins with a cry for retribution,
the fourth seal is the rider of death
followed closely, immediately by Hades,
the nightmare of the first three,
the savagery of man slaughtering man.

You can imagine a pastor who is neither young nor old, 
his appearance is similar to a schoolteacher, simple yet sly, 
he knows everyone here, even those not yet born,
he feels a certain weariness from knowing them too well and from having nowhere else to go. 

Someone you once knew and who no longer speaks to you 
is sleeping on your front stoop.  Tiny particles of his body 
 
blow off in the wind and tiny particles of his body constantly 
blow back.  He seems in no hurry to leave, no hurry to stay. 

Dizzied and calmed, Justin resized the browser window and opened a new one, arranging them side-by-side. He began shopping for Stingray Corvettes with one eye while monitoring the pump.fun dashboard with the other.

Don’t wave your sanitized rainbow at me.
I am a child of the ’80s.
I remember our brothers
dying in hospital beds alone,
partners kept out in waiting rooms
like strangers,

Though each year's spring may be the last for us,
We take our comfort driving side by side,
And opt to greet each season without fuss
As we have done for decades, groom and bride.

Borgia showed every perversity of the Pope and his brood. There was brother-sister incest. The Pope himself had the grossest sexual desire (unrequited) for Lucrezia.

“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” So begins Slaughter House Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death.