Luke Scott Stringer
from Eunuch Poems:
an Otherwise annotation of Acts 8:26-40
36.
A miracle is an unwieldy creature.
Some of it matters. Mostly ghost.
When wine was needed, it whined.
When water was, it found foothold, found fountain.
Creature to creature, even now it gallops beside you.
What would stop it if you slipped?
37a.*
[AR-15s. Autocrats. Arson fires immolating. Arguments for slavery. Boy code. Body bags. Bait and switch bullying. Biblical inerrancy. Comphet. Crusades. Closed communion. Courts of law. Currency exchanges. Conversion therapy. Church policy. Death sentences. Deadly sentences. Evangelical vote. Eugenics textbooks. Epidemics. F-slur graffiti. Forced castrations. Feigned sympathy. Fatal isolation. Fire and brimstone. Gatekeeping. Gender essentialism. Genteel genocide. Holding things in tension. Hate crimes. Hearing without listening. Healthy self-preservation. Ignorance. Integralism. Inherently disordered. It’s just a phase. It’s just the truth. It’s not my fault the Bible says. Just read the Bible. Just don’t masturbate. Just shut up and listen. Kill your self. Love the sinner but hate the sin. Lynchings. Militias. Magisteriums. Molotov cocktails. Mandatory celibacies. Missionaries. No seat at the table. No reason to change. Old Boys Club. Other priorities. Proud Boys. Plain sense reading. Prooftexts. Puritanical sex aversion. Q Anon. Quiet suffering. Republican lawmakers. Rational debate. Ready-made panic. Smear the queer. Southern Baptist Conventions. Supreme Court injustices. Strangulation. Save the Children. Set the world on fire for God. Thoughts and prayers terrorism. The heart is deceitful above all things. Underwhelm. Underpasses. Under-siege mindset. Ur-Fascism. Versions of events. Verse mistranslations. Vanishing acts. Vestiges of the Good Old Days. White replacement theory. Welcoming but not affirming. Witnesses (none). Xenophobia. X-Acto knives smuggled. Young-Earth Creationist youth pastors. You’re safe here. You’re better off dead. You don’t have to do this. Zero-accountability zealotry. Zero-sum games.]*
37b.*
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Luke Scott Stringer is a poet and artist from Oologah, OK. He currently lives in New Haven, CT, having recently completed a master's degree in religion and literature at Yale Divinity School. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in EcoTheo Review, SAGE Magazine, The Yale Herald, and These Fifty States. Find him on Instagram @stringer_things.