the night, the kings, the war
this land is consecrated, baptized in cellulose
acetate and the waters of the potomac. which
is just as well, because you’re a godless heathen,
with no belief in an afterlife. on a sunday morning
in late february, we meet at your carceral pew. I
take my place at the chancel, offer myself up. we
commune. who is parishioner and who is priest?
you cast your lot long ago; you have been ordained
to live out a life shuffled endlessly between geographies
meant to contain you. an unbeliever, if you invoked a
spirit, it wouldn’t be a prayer to a deity, but a plea,
to anyone who would listen: for commutation, like
barabbas, son of the father, destined for death but,
at the last moment, freed. and now, the ground you
walk on, the haze in the air — these things as unholy
as original sin. if god were real, he wouldn’t have to
explain why you’ve been forsaken. if god were real,
he wouldn’t have to tell you why you’re not forgiven.
Natalye Childress
Natalye Childress (she/her) is a Berlin-based editor, writer, translator, and sad punk. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Farewell Transmission, Anti-Heroin Chic, Sontag Mag, scaffold, Epistemic Literary, Honeyguide, and elsewhere. She has an MA in creative writing, and her first book, The Aftermath of Forever, was published by Microcosm Publishing.
Why Taylor Loved It:
I mean this poem is so far up my alley I feel like I’m already living there. The ending devastated me in a way that's hard to phrase, but the sentiment is a moment of vulnerability from a speaker who is trying to put on a tough face.
There's a moment of "lift" in the transition from the first stanza to the second that grabs the reader by the throat and says "okay get ready this poem is not messing around".
More than that, I think there is a level of grief in this poem that is almost trying to hide itself, like the speaker isn’t ready to face it, but like grief typically does, it is there hiding in the space between faith, doubt, and forgiveness.
I’m also a sucker for a poem with big rhetorical questions. This craft choice brings readers head on with their own existence. Where is the line between parishioner and priest? And at the end of the day, aren’t we all “godless heathens” in our own way?
Interview with the author:
Why did you choose to submit to Team Taylor?
As soon as I read the line about religious trauma I immediately knew I'd submit to Taylor, but it became a matter of determining which poem I'd choose, 'cause I've got a lot (of religious trauma and poems and poems with religious trauma). Also, DINOSAURS. And let's be real, I wanted to have a poem accepted (who doesn't? though my collection of rejections is looking pretty pretty pretty good), and when I looked through my available poems I couldn't really find one where I thought "Oh Martheaus would love this!" I like many of the themes he mentions, but I just don't think I've written about them. But maybe that's my next challenge...
This poem ends in a really punchy/impactful way, talk to me about how you came to this ending?
I am currently working on a manuscript about a friend of mine serving life in prison, and this piece will be included. The poems talk about guilt, crime, shame, justice, punishment, abolition, forgiveness, faith. I should note we were both raised in some form of the church but we both identify as atheists, or agnostics at best. We have a weekly phone call, and often during our conversations, we get deep into spiritual and philosophical questions, which are deeply entwined with his situation. He has a parole hearing coming up in a few years, and it's a real chance for his release, but he also wrestles with the idea of if he deserves to be forgiven, which is a moral question that many incarcerated individuals struggle with. Those last lines, the "if god were real" ones, are meant to emphasize that we don't need a deity to tell us what's right and wrong. You said the ending "devastated" you and I'm so happy (I know, but hear me out) because that's what I was going for, so it means it worked. I wanted it to highlight (especially against the background of some of the other pieces in this collection) that not only does he wake up every day with a sick feeling of regret, but I also, as his friend, have my own conflict about caring for someone who did something terrible but whom I don't believe to be a terrible person.
Talk to me about your writing process for this poem? Where were you when the original idea came to you? How did revising it go?
The idea for this poem came to me in a non-linear way. I flew to the US in February to visit the friend this poem is about, and so I used that scene of meeting in real life as the basis for this poem, carrying over religious imagery and the story of Barabbas having a commuted sentence (which is what so many people in prison hope for but few receive; additionally, so many scholars argue Barabbas did not deserve a pardon, which is poignant in a way when you think about how arbitrarily punishment is enacted/enforced across courtrooms and the prison industrial complex). It was the first time I'd been in a prison, which was nothing like I expected in so many ways. It was a "no contact" visit, where we were seated across from one another with this sort of half-partition, and it felt like we were in a confessional. I had some lines in my notes app about this experience, but no clear direction about where they were going.
Then, in late April or so, when I saw another lit magazine doing a call for pieces around the theme of "holy," I started drafting something to fit that theme, with the last two lines actually being some of the first ones that came to me. It quickly took on a life of its own, where I pieced together these other fragments from my phone with some of the darker, more existentialist/nihilistic things we'd been talking about (and in the end, I determined the end result wasn't even a good fit for the call/aesthetics of the journal). I took a break from it for a day or two, and then I did some research about the history of where he's located. I found out it's literally built on the grounds of a former factory that created cellulose acetate, and the groundwater and soil have contamination. I find this fascinating, but not surprising when you look at the history of prisons and where they tend to be built, and I knew I wanted to work this idea into the poem, of "unholy people" living in an "unholy place" — again, so many places this could be tied in to the Bible. After I had this additional kind of throughline, of person and place and religion woven together, it quickly came together into the piece it is now.