Hermeneutics & Exegesis
Eternal Life
A screaming from the tabernacle rattles the crucifix off its golden altar.
The eucharist flinches in Father’s rat-tooth nails, his pus-balloon fingers.
Body and blood of Christ thrashes in my throat - I gag, and spit out God.
Gramma comes home with a glittery red wreath of babyguts pinned to her exposed skull,
Like a big, fancy hat resting on the loose scalp pulled down over her ears.
She lurches for a kiss with teeth, life everlasting stuck in her dentures.
Her body sure is more alive than I’ve ever seen it,
Growling, biting, and getting back up every time I shoot her.
Fruit of Thy Womb
Blue light moons the walnut shell sand and desolate driveway,
A magic-ship quietly blows the dust off the cracked scalp of the desert.
Mary thought it looked like Joseph had flicked a nickel high in the cool air,
It’s hypnotizing - it stuck her in her bedroom window.
The wallpaper pales and a beam strikes Mary’s face blank,
Her eyes glow like a flashlight through a ping-pong ball
A cry in the night, a warm sprinkling of tears spanning three daffodils wide,
Then nothing.
Mary creeps up weeks later, spitting her teeth at her worried mother.
She’s changed; her eyes telepathic and flashing, the transparent pallor of her skin,
Like a plastic-wrapped zombie, rot-bruised and bloated.
People whisper of sky-angels and invasions of space-lights,
The town hides its daughters under tinfoil bedsheets and hunts
through cornfields with metal detectors.
He didn’t do it, Joseph pleads.
They believe him, he’s only eleven after all,
And the face pressing through the stretchy rubber of Mary’s belly doesn’t look like him.
Project Proposal
For my final project I intend to explore an aspect of my personal life that has come to feature in a lot of my work, both in writing and illustration; Catholicism. I intend to put my catholic upbringing and religion’s role in the world around me under the lens of critique and with a horror flair. To do this, I will be using my eight poems to create an anthology of personal Hermeneutics and Exegesis which will focus on the Mother Mary, my own mother, the politics of female sexuality, Jesus kissing Judas, and more.
As of right now, I have six solid directions that I want to use in my poems and I’ve divided them into three styles I want to write them in; Campy Horror, Horror as Critique, and Just Critique.
I want to use Campy Horror to take two religious events, that are usually treated as very sacred and untouchable, and use ridiculous and overdone horror motifs and plots to challenge how important and powerful these events really are, as well as invert their meanings. To be more specific, in one of the poems, I will be rewriting the annunciation of the lord (when the angel Gabriel told Mary that she was to give birth to God’s child, despite being a virgin) as an alien invasion, in which Mary is an unwitting victim of the aliens and used a Host Body. In the other Campy Horror poem, I will be using the Eucharist Ritual (in which the bread and wine are transfigured into the body and blood of Christ) as the starting point for a zombie apocalypse. Life everlasting ... but at what cost?
Horror as Critique is exactly what it sounds like; these poems will involve thoughts and judgements I have about elements of Catholicism explored in more depth and seriousness than the Campy Horror poems. For example, I plan to analyze the character of the “Blessed Virgin” as a torture device used upon women; an impossible standard, to be a mother without sex, and one that tells women that they must not want sex, only the child. A tool to groom victims of sexual abuse and shame women who actually want sex, treating consent like a sin. I wrote a zine this past summer touching on the topic a little bit, and I used the metaphor of the Blessed Virgin being an Iron Maiden, which I think will be my starting point for this specific poem. I also want to explore the idea of “unconditional love” which was something so frequently taught to me as a child; that God’s love is unconditional, that we must love all people unconditionally, my mother claims she loves me unconditionally, etc. Yet, those who claim to love unconditionally, in my experience, have been the most abusive. What is it worth to say you love everyone, yet simultaneously rally against gay rights, abortion laws, domestic protections, etc. And, isn’t love meaningless unless it engages on a specific and personal level? Unless it knows you? I want to characterize “Unconditional Love” as a serial killer, and the poem is an interrogation.
My Just Critique poems have no clear stylistic flair yet, but they are also based on personal/religious experiences that are meaningful to me. The first is one actually quite close to OCAD university; a man has been scrawling “ABORTION KILLS” “JESUS SAVES” “PRAY THE ROSARY” all over bus shelters, flyers, walls, even on the memorial for a girl murdered by the honour police. I know it’s a man because he rode by on a bike screaming “ABORTION KILLS” at people on the street, including me. My second idea is far more romantic and fictional; I want to rephrase the death of Jesus as punishment for kissing Judas, that the two were lovers, and the story is a tragic romance, not one of resurrection and God.