Three votive candles

1. The angel answers: The Holy Spirit will come upon you.

She always has to be on top, or I’d break her wings beneath her on the bed. The condoms she brings from Heaven glow, faintly, and play ambient alleluias. With stainless steel fingernails she carves the Beatitudes on my back.

Blessed are they which do hunger.

And the sweat at the nape of her neck reeks of God’s eternal sorrow. Her diamond nipples cut me into stained glass. I kiss her secret wings, and taste the ghost of a snail glazed in honey. When she comes, her halo explodes, and my mouth fills with feathers.

In the morning, I wake from Presbyterian dreams to pick platinum pubic hairs from the damp sheets. I hang one between my fingers like a fish hook of mercy.

2. Quoth Lesions of Nazareth: Let suffering children come into me.

The haemorrhage prophet was a fisher of mud. For forty days in the desert he suffered the reptiles to come into him. In Galilee, he turned the loaves to blisters. In the Decapolis, he flayed a mongrel hound. From Bethsaida to Gennesaret, he walked on the wafers. The stigmata of palms weeping iodine, yeast of Herod’s immaculate infection. The haemorrhage prophet bit the eyes of his disciples and burned the temple to a silhouette. He went with his truncheon to assault a leper in the garden of Gethsemane. Transfigured, he emerged wearing a swine’s head.

The haemorrhage prophet died so that men would have eternal meat.

They brought him to Golgotha, where from a chalice he picked ten fresh foreskins and ringed his fingers. He carried his own skull to the intersection of wood. He inhaled the nails, he gnawed the cross.

Eli, Eli, the llamas spoke of sabachthani.

3. Whispers the prophet: If you hear my voice and open the door,
I will come in to you.

After she married, Scheherezade kept her owls in the ovens of devotion. The ants in her husband’s beard threw rice to the dog. In the bedroom closet, eyes rolled like wet marbles. In spring, cinnamon fell from the trees in red clouds.

Are you talking about the happy spider? he asked. He let his beard fill up with lice, and stayed up late eating Buddha rice.

On the front lawn, aliens from Paradise taught one another to pose in vogue freezeframe, still as the sculpted voluptuary Madonna. The dog cried.

Any questions? she asked. He was salting the television. I’m afraid all my bondages are out rubbering the town red tonight. But your airplane stays relevant to the good china.

In the back yard, the willows picked up their green skirts and slouched towards the windows. Among the branches, vultures knocked their circumcised skulls together in time. The willows watched as she shrouded him in scarves of sixty-watt light. In the living room, their love fidgeted before the ultraviolet shadows on the wall, squirming like a child who wasn’t sorry.

Have I been whitelisted? she wondered.