Not-Sure-Why Poem

 Saturn moans and crows

Into the paper cone of a black hole;

Mars waxes silent for bluer times

Which no one minded to remember.

The farthest stars tremble in thin, pregnant air,

Beckoning for each other’s warmth

With twisting flares of flame.

Everything expanding to contract,

Living death, it would seem,

To meet no end at all.

Ye Suburban Gods

There you go again,

Blasting Boards of Canada

On headphones that betray

All privacy!

Your nose deep

In handheld devices,

You wonder, listless, when

Life might serve to entertain…

The carrots and ranch you

Roll over your tongue 

Are your ambrosia,

Your eggcrate mattress topper

A cumulous throne.

You’re itching for divine suitors, but

All who call upon you are those 

With zest for: dog, local travel,

40oz water bottle,

Essential oil hand sanitizer in 

200K-mile sedan console,

2.5 precious children 401k dream.

Are these not your ilk?

If they are not,

You will die a damned hermit.

Hypocrite! You sigh

And stare listlessly into

Your reflection on the wall:

Who am I not, then?

With that, you shapeshift

Into regal, heavy-beaked swan

(To better elicit affection)

And flap out the window,

Presumably to fondle the curve of the sun,

Carrots bouncing onto dull carpet.

No Superlative Litany

As if nothing were new anymore,

Except for the world ending—

You remarked, your hands outstretched

to usher a popping, crackling host,

Alive, to your tongue.

As if the world were ending,

Accept departure

and give me your body.

It is the whisper I heard on

A vast and ebbing wind.

El Niño

A heron splits the night

with razor feathers that

Lap and tear into 

Damp atmosphere.

It slashes onward

without a face,

and there are

Indeterminate

Flourishes of

Abstraction across

Its path.

Artifices collide as

Cold and warm fronts

Eddying and whipping 

in frigid vortexes,

Famished for humanity,

Vacuuming up our words 

Suspended in pregnant air,

X’s and dipthongs vibrating,

Ampersands saltando,

Commas and hyphens, col legno;

and a waterfall of information 

Plucked like a silver string.

It dances in place, sinew

Wound tight to stone pegs

and a liquid neck. 

It does not paint secrecy with

Words; it fastens quick

While fascinating. It

Lows a faint cry, 

Begging for defibrillation:

Victor Frankenstein’s

Monster, displaced from

Alpine majesty, but

Remaining ensconced in

Those same books and

Grandiose arguments.

All the dreams I had for other women

All the dreams I had for other women

Are coming true for me, today:

Seated neatly against a white background,

Like a word printed for the first time

I experience Nothingness

and its peace, like the stale public air

in the back of a Crown Victoria,

or behind a locked aluminum door.

From snitched pulpit watching

Us all spin to self-wished

Future emblazoned

with complacent tongues of fire,

I wonder with anxious burden

What I have, in ignorance,

Pilfered in the high-viz night,

and the things which I 

Cannot give back,

as It All is now a burnt emblem 

of necessary shame.

It is an ongoing travesty—

Obvious Poem

Sturdy trees grow awkwardly.

Thin wisps that flip in the 

wind, malleable to its will,

stretch too-big hands to

strike the sun in

misplaced rage. 

Their dance is jutting

and askew. They have

permanent blood that

stains your hands. 

When you crack them in half,

they find a way to

stretch in resentment still,

idle to the earth’s death-wish,

until they quit, and bloom. 

AI and Art

AI can never be as alive or as culturally deviant as we endeavor to be. It can never achieve our lived experiences, and so it does not have the power to take our voices away; it doesn’t understand. It sets a higher bar for all writers linguistically, but it will never take away the souls of the living. In the real world, it takes our jobs, and it reveals ever-darkening corners within corporations' greed. When it comes to independent artists, it advances us at a terrible cost. 

AI, like most artists, is derivative. Its problem is that is all it is. Every poet is a cannibal and every artist a thief: however, that is not their defining factor. It shouldn’t be: derivative, fun artists from Bob Ross to Greta can Fleet can only be taken at face value and then thanked for their entries while others work to advance the craft. This is the same token familiarity of AI art (though a little off, as it doesn’t often fully understand the assignment yet), even at its most abstract—that is, before keeling off into the uncanny and most deceased-to-its-core to the point where its life is only breathed into it by its critic. AI art is inherently empirical; it cannot create new art that is not based in some way on some established mechanic. 

At its best, its abstraction lacks soul; it can only advance its derivative nature before sprawling into abstractions that can only advance our art and challenge us to be better. At the same time, AI simply shows off what computers can do; it cannot demonstrate the limits of human capability because it is not human. Only its creators and interpreters can humanize whatever it produces. 

Figure Study

Sweetened-up strings hold fast to your fingers—you hear resonance like a false harmonic when they unstick. You hammer wrought-iron fingertips into its long neck’s ebony; the vibration through your knuckles rings familiar and mechanical.

Punctuating your collective frustration, you draw the bow in a quick chop in front of the bridge. You peer through its f-hole (you’re intimate).  Amidst breadth of dust hides a deceased Czech’s last name and a serial number tracing to an old tome. You blow into it, but nothing will ever escape its chambers.

Pizzicato feels like raindrops falling on your fingers. A little warped like you, it wears the grey gum of centuries; its pegs only budge after a thick coat of graphite or lipstick. Maybe she’s born with it—maybe it’s Maybelline.

In its satin-lined coffin are a tin of Pirastro rosin and a plastic tube keeping a humidifier nonsensically dry. On a velour bed, a rogue piece of music which had been pressed into the strings’ form after having the lid shut on top multiple times. Between a good bow and a heavy one that murders your knotty fingers, a picture of you and your little sister at a pumpkin farm in 1996.

It is a member of the family, its scroll a binding ketubah.  Expensive like a marriage, the thought of losing it gives you anxiety not unlike a marriage. Its voice is close to Astrud Gilberto’s. Buying and selling it ends here, and it will be buried with you, like an ancient pet in its sarcophagus. 

Trapus Margutis / It’s Delicate

An early memory

of my Lithuanian 

grandmother blowing

the warmth from

an egg with a straw

My longing for simple

crayon-waxed caresses

While watching her adeptly 

etching with 

all her affection

Beautiful litvak with

knowledge of Easter eggs

sharp as needles with which

she afflicted their plump

promise,

she could relate to them:

she had been stuck and 

drained, too.

But she had survived it all.

—She won’t talk about

Those Things and That Time

but she cannot bring herself to speak about

anything else. She speaks in

bright crayons and toothpicks—

Margutis,

vibrant shell:

when you glue on a sequin,

you cover its wound,

and it can serve no purpose

anymore but to feel

vibrations:

the pulse of 

living fingertips.

Margučiai,

vacant wombs:

though they’ve lost their warmth,

their colors breathe a certain life

from their little wooden bowl.

Let’s Eat Indoors Today

Let’s Eat Indoors Today

An aging art critic shuffled through the Tate, stomach rumbling, seeking something to chew on. Maybe the bubbled umber skin of Jeff Koons' Basketball-in-Tank, or, better, a steak carved from Damien Hirst’s Shark-in-Tank. It all gave off the same pretentious rubbery flavor, though, as the billion-dollar Matisse escargot that audiences flocked for—and that one didn’t even come with its own takeout box; not yet.

Giacometti's gaunt figures were far from hearty--the man craved something juicy, with rolls of flesh. He strode past some other name-droppings: plop plop, like a divine trail of colorful sugar buttons on a piece of waxed paper. A Miró to melt in his mouth! A writhing Bacon ensconced on a chaise: Bacon, who geschmacked of meat-as-murder, as if sparkling pork drippings roiled to life off the artist's scrumptious name onto a pan fashioned from stretched canvas. ‘Crispy,’ thought the critic with ravish, as he daydreamed how it would feel to gnaw the butchered ribs from Painting (1946).

The masters tantalized him, but these all neared expiration and had begun to emit a vinegared putridity, like the ambitious Hirstian feast the man ravenously devoured at the Royal Academy a few months prior.

Having almost given up hope for lunch, the nostril-piercing new-car aroma from a hyperslim Citroën brought saliva to the man’s lips at the touring Gabriel Orozco exhibition. The thing that really transported him, though, was the whiff of elevator chassis he barely could stoop into, as if it were made for him. It reminded him of the glass elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which made his stomach peal with a crack of thunder.

Piqued by the supple glory of its humble industrial genius, the man gobbled the chassis’ guts with vigor: gnawing wires, crunching bulbs copper and all while purveyors gawked at him in wonder. He ravished it down to its certificate of inspection: City of Chicago, last serviced 1993 (a great harvest year). It did not take the man very long at all to gulp down the piece’s innards as screws and nails dripped to the floor. 

Sated, the man eked on through the exhibition, belly fuddled by the promise of dessert. He popped a cue ball that swung from the ceiling by a rope into his mouth as he passed an interactive piece involving a billiards table, snapping the ball’s cord as if he were plucking apple from branch. To slake his thirst, he slurped up the lotus pool in the middle of Ping Pond Table, to paddle-wielders’ horror and general malaise. 

Newly fattened, nearly satisfied; our man caught the Tube home to a coffin-like apartment off Covent Road—his own chassis—while mulling over a snack-bag of Ai Wei Wei’s ceramic sunflower seeds. Perhaps the knotted black tape inside a ripped cassette copy of Ono’s Cut Piece would be an appropriate midnight snack:  but home food is never that good, nor that expensive.

Tied Up

Someone asked,

“Could you write me

a book of poetry by hand?”

I gave it to them

but I bound it with the ropes

I use to bind me:

My torso hangs akimbo

like a masterpiece

in butchered pieces—

suspended—

some consider it

perverted; others

a knotted ballet—

I consider it a job,

binding my heart up

like any 

self-proclaimed artist

or deviant

would.

You should

know by now 

that I am bound

hard and fast, too,

within a proverbial Chinese

finger trap:

Push closer!

You yell,

but I tug

to pull away

like every interdiction

against our being

Here I am

hangin’ around 

with-

in

the 

rope

you

use

to

b

i

n

d

m

e

—yank!—

Cameo: Zoe T

Un lotus pivoine

dans un étang étouffant

fleurit pour guêpes

To An Enemy

You were not some steppingstone. 

You were not some era

nor a blemish; not some dybbuk 

in a filthy box that collects

dust and ire in the farthest 

reaches of my mind. 

You are no tool,

no example nor 

lesson.

You are instead a fiery emblem

and a gift: 

one hundred petals

unfurled and

alight

(Workspace) Born to Agree: A Trilogy of Short Stories

Thank you for looking this over: none of these three stories are finished, and they won't be without your appreciated input. Please send feedback to slanafeedback@gmail.com.

Compromise

Quiet seized a lab populated with scientists--or throttled its comfort.

They’d borne witness to many ideas over the past eight years. Bordello's brow knit as time began to slow: "But this implement works." He raised the awkwardly long shrouded rectangle from the ground to waist level with emphasis.

"The hell do we know that?" Bill Dillard, the senior researcher and, of course, token group skeptic, pointed out. 

Bordello had tried it on someone. On whom, they asked. It was none of their business. Tucker "Tex" Aikens, a man who pushed his toothpick legs through the same pleated chinos every day, felt compelled to speak up, as he deemed it was his turn:

"Folks, what we had here was some deranged California beatnik and a Korean psychologist fraternizing under the authority of this, our Eyetalian goofus, to paint magic wingnut propaganda that'll brainwash us all to see commie red." He pivoted to turn his back on the crew and face Bordello with a smile that had solar wrinkles prematurely baked in: "We're all worried about your head, Birdellah."

Deafening silence followed that truth. Even Tex regarded Pino Bordello as one of them: sane, pragmatic. Not the kind to try anything too floo-floo--forget fine art. Scientists' scientists. 

As a result, this magic painting shtick embarrassed the entire group, and this meeting, summarily, was considered a mandatory timesuck. The idea at present was almost as bad as colleague Karol Kurwitz's "solution," proposed six years prior, which was really just a specialty toy for men.

"Next just have a kid construct a papier mache bust of Hackman, buddy. Earn us a raise." Tex's sprayed-together blonde mass of hair volleyed precariously across his head as he scoffed. The guy was only 30, and obviously suffering in a marriage he committed to out of high school. Bordello could relate some amount.

Regarding the papier-mache bust, everyone in that lecture hall reported to Ezra Hackman since the special project's inception, which happened in the weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sometime in October, but not Halloween. Hackman was the boss who kept everyone motivated through eight years of failed ideas, themselves of varying quality.

Silence. Finally, Bordello could return to explain: "My subject then became attentive. I started by telling them that a piece of flatware must be picked up."

"Who was your subject?"

"Your mother, Tex!" Dillard piped up in the back.

Bordello cautiously made eye contact with Hackman, who had presumedly heard his name earlier and was now propping his stocky frame up against the threshold. Hackman nodded at Bordello to continue.

"...They picked up the spoon without question. I gave them more directions framed in that exact script: the subject walked in three concentric circles and completed an intermediate Calculus problem, incorrectly."

"So, it didn't make h--"

"--er some kind of genius or automaton. Correct, Tex. Your mom needs a Math tutor." Bordello grinned.

Hackman's voice spilled from the doorway, ordering Bordello and Tex to cut it out and to secret the implement into the main boardroom. Tex smiled and wished Bordello luck, clenching Bordello's shoulder with big-brotherly force. There were rumors that the head of the FBI might be there in that boardroom. Bordello didn't care much--that guy was going to want to see this.

-----

"A painting that makes everybody agree. That's--normal." FBI Director Price Goddard raised two well trimmed sausage-link eyebrows above horned browline glasses.

It was part of a grant-funded science program, enacted to quell the mass hysteria around the A-bomb. Simple enough, their credo was that a solution to make everyone agree would be to ensure no more bombs would drop. Peace would be enacted as law, but without the violent authoritarianism from which the world currently suffered. And how to make this so was matchingly ridiculous.

On one side of the government-led project, the nation's best teachers worked with violent prisoners to design an intensive reeducation program to rewire the brain against hatred. Nothing had come out of that yet: it had been eight years. On the other, a room full of scientists tested everything they knew about the world to concoct serums, devise treatment regimens, have Karol Kurwitz hock his sex toy, anything to get the most ornery, angriest, most stubborn to agree. But in reality, over eight years, all they had learned was that they were agreeing less and less, especially with each other.

But then in August 1949 Pino Bordello had a dream about his artist wife Alice painting a lush green landscape with knotted oak trees and a twisting waterfall spinning from the sky into a watering hole. Normally, Pino thought landscapes were hackish and boring. Normally--and normally, he was an exhausted father to a one-year-old, surfing the toilet-bowl rim of his marriage. But this one made him feel such peace that he swore upon waking he felt like he could never take up an argument with anyone ever again.

That morning, Bordello had shaken Alice awake, begging her to devise such a landscape. Alice plainly reminded Bordello that she was a ceramicist, not to mention seven months pregnant with their second child, and ensconced herself once more at the potter's wheel, forcing Bordello to ring up his younger brother in California.

It took a while to find Carmello, who went at that time by Crispin Upward to "save the Medigans a tongue-sprain." Bordello knew it was to sound like some cultured white asshole who had grown up in the suburbs, some hipster.  Carmello was living in Haight-Ashbury--which wasn't so predictable in 1950--and knew plenty of artists Bordello could work with, if he was willing to pay out.

Carmello had no shot hanging out with bohemians, Bordello thought to himself, but the kid wrote about skiffle music now, or at least that's what he told the family last Christmas. Ostensibly, though, those connections came through when Bordello picked up the phone and heard the voice of Holocaust and Holodomor survivor Leonas Ostrobromski, only the most talented artist anyone had never heard of. That's what he said, point blank, when Bordello asked. 

He sent over some prints, which were indeed astonishingly impressive. Bordello admired them quizzically: none of them expressed identifiable postmodernistic or “in” qualities, at least not the minimalistic gray and beige brutalism of contemporary years. Something even better, more progressive; antiderivative. Not didactic, but obviously thematic. Not maximalistic, but definitely not without its own meditative detail. Divinely, gloriously interesting. The opposite of boring.

Bordello offered to pay for Leonas' rent and groceries until the painting was done—a sort of satellite artist-in-residence, Leonas pointed out. 

And there was one last thing: Leonas was going to have to work with company. The greatest--albeit in the cheaper bracket--Jungian psychologist in LA, Dr. Baek-Hyeon "Beck" Kang, would be visiting the compound Leonas lived on with his beatnik compadres. Dr. Kang was overqualified for this unorthodox arrangement, which in turn worked out much better for the painting itself and its success.

Wildly, Dr. Kang and Leonas were the worst of enemies from the get-go. Leonas's self-importance, alcoholism, and spontaneous abstract profundity did not match Kang's nebbishy, purposeful industriousness, and nothing was accomplished for the first six months. 

Then, however, Kang lent Leonas a recent publication by Joseph Campbell, which charmed Leonas into docility. Newfound attraction united them even further, even within the realm of a temporal passion that lasted through the painting's second and third years of creative gestation. Kang was more Leonas’s Kahlo than his Gala Elouard, unfortunately, and whatever analogical Diego Rivera was in Leonas found another doomed romance with Leonas’ next muse, Allen Ginsberg.

Dr. Kang nixed the waterspout-out-of-the-waterhole imagery from Bordello’s dream from the get-go. The waterspout was violent--a painting that gets people to agree using Jungian theory, Kang explained, should first calm our tempestuous emotional inner selves. Kang mentioned a “villain archetype dormant between the liminal spaces in our beings” as well as some other highfalutin bullshit Bordello couldn’t fully recall. The bottom line was that the painting should feel like the composition intrinsically understood the onlooker from first glance ("like the subject is at home, in a house they designed themselves," Kang once remarked abstrusely). It should also have an unpretentious feeling of exigence.

"Toward what?" Bordello asked.

Kang and Leonas looked at one another knowingly. "That is our final secret."

After four years, the painting was finished, but to no fanfare. No one knew about the project save Bordello, "Crispin," Leonas, Dr. Kang, and maybe Allen Ginsberg. Not even Bordello's higher-ups in Virginia knew of this project--Bordello had taken on this endeavor, along with its risks, independently.

Which brought him here to this shotgun-style boardroom--the "firing room" of latent infamy--breathing the same air as Price Goddard and about thirty other government higher-ups. 

"This is my implement, or one devised by my colleagues Mr. Ostrobromski and Dr. Kang. It is very powerful when the onlooker has it in their field of vision, sans occlusion. I have invented special glasses that block out all the colors the implement uses. Please retrieve the glasses from your pocket folders now as I take off the painting's tarp."

With grace Goddard slipped off his glasses, and on with the special pair. "Bordello! I can't see a thing!" He ripped off the special pair--"These are painted black!"

"Yes." Bordello plucked his own special pair from his breast pocket. "The painting uses many colors, and you don't need any distraction with this thing anyway. From what I've seen, it's dangerously persuasive."

"...Who hired this guy?"

"Sergeant Tanner," Goddard snapped. "Put on your black glasses and keep your damn mouth shut: you sure are lucky you secured all that artillery from the Nazis in Stalingrad." Goddard shifted in his seat and pushed up his own pair of shades.

Bordello's eyes narrowed--did the military have it out for the FBI or something? His attention snapped back upon Goddard's verbal command. "Alright. I will reveal the implement. Before I do, I need one volunteer to complete my instruction...for the demonstration." He cleared his throat.

The audience of uniformed men turned and chanted "Tanner," almost in unison. Tanner grinned peevishly and stood up, ripping off his glasses and flicking dust off two intimidating pectorals. Everyone heard Goddard's throat rattle in disgust.

Bordello's own throat quickly dried out while Tanner lumbered over like the linebacker he probably was in college. Bordello noted a Purple Heart suspended among the bars on his lapel, and doubted Tanner was enabled to act like such a yutz on most assignments. 

"Ready, sergeant?"

"Ready as I'll ever be, I guess. What's this thing supposed to do to me?"

"Oh, only everything I say," Bordello smiled, guiding Tanner to a chair in front of the painting. "Everybody, please make sure your blackout shades are on."

Tanner sighed with a little exasperated disbelief and sat. He chuckled to himself. "I don't need these glasses at all?"

"Nope." Bordello situated himself behind the painting and slipped off its shroud.

Tanner sat transfixed by the painting for a moment, wide-eyed. "Wow." 

"Tanner, it's very early."

Tanner glanced at his watch. "Yeah, though I don't mind it."

"...You're a big guy, aren't you, Tanner?"

Gasps resounded. 

Tanner laughed heartily. "I guess I am."

"A big, burly boy who needs his milk?"

Goddard burst out with laughter.

Tanner chortled and sighed, "I prefer something stronger, but milk is fine."

Bordello transcribed the conversation on a legal pad. 

After another moment: "Tanner, I'm feeling very tired. Do you agree?"

"You're feeling very tired."

"No shit.” Bordello looked at Goddard, who was now bouncing with laughter at the head of the table. Whether it was at Bordello or Tanner—maybe both—Bordello didn’t know or really mind. “Tanner, do you agree that you have been looking forward to this meeting for the past year?"

"My senses tell me that isn't true, but I do agree. It's an important meeting, after all." He paused. "What's it about, exactly?"

The crew of stoically outfitted military men tittered like a group of high schoolers. 

Bordello picked up a red flashcard. "This is blue. Do you agree?"

"It looks red to me, but I'm afraid I have to agree that, yes, that is definitely a blue card."

"Are you sure?"

"Sure as I'll ever be." Tanner scoffed with some vestigial entitlement. How could Bordello believe stupid blue card was red. 

"Thank you, Tanner. You should go sit back in the chair you were in before this demonstration, don't you think?"

Tanner rose and stomped back to his seat at the long boardroom table, a disbelieving half-smile on his face. He was not robotic in his actions; rather, the apparent brainwashing seemed only to add a pleasant bounce to his jockish affect.

Goddard harrumphed. "Sergeant Tanner!”

“Mmmmmmm?” He shot Goddard a puckered-lip over-the-shoulder glance like a minxy pinup. 

 “It is so that you must do a backflip on top of this table."

Tanner laughed. Shakily, he mounted his rolling chair and then scaled the table, his patent dress shoes gleaming under well tailored uniform trousers as he threw his head back with laughter.  He chasséd goofily, springing and twisting and lunging chest-upward into a graceful backwards dive headfirst into the table, screaming with laughter all along the way. 

Even as the audience members removed their glasses and Bordello scrambled to pull the canvas tarpaulin back on the painting, Tanner laughed. They had to basically scrape his scalp off the table, he hit it so hard headfirst, and his ankle was badly sprained from his attempt, but he laughed as though he knew the punchline to the world's dumbest joke.

After the dust cleared and Tanner, still rolling, had been taken out on a gurney and presumedly discharged, Goddard broke the silence that filled the boardroom:

"I don't know if I fully believe this is a thing, Bordello. Sergeant Tanner is known for being something we in the business like to call shit for brains."

"With respect, why don't you just volunteer yourself then, sir?" Bordello suggested.

"I guess if it works we'll agree about something."

Five minutes later, Bordello helmed a room of believers.

Ethos

"Leigh Weinberger" was not a name with a je ne sais quoi. 

Juxtaposed with that fact, it gleamed white beside INCUMBENT PRESIDENT DUPREE ANDREWS and GOLDEN TICKET PARTY CANDIDATE BLAKE SVENSON on a backlit viewfinder between animated swirls of filigree. Not a pundit herself, Leigh awaited her cue between the candidates, straight-backed in a hard little chair the setup people had found for her off set. 

Leigh was actually an underpaid clinical therapist from Decatur, Ohio who tested out of a single Government course requirement back at Oberlin in 2067. Not necessarily someone with the inherent authority to mediate a presidential debate, she felt like an imposter as her feet hung off her chair, whorly tresses spilling down her arms. The two blonde Northern European folks that bookended Leigh loomed hulkingly over her frame, but her strict posture gave her a confident air. She folded her hands over a government-issued laptop after buttoning the open-knit mohair cardigan her sister made for her last fall.

The set that she sat on was surreal and bleak, she surmised. So was the task in front of her.

In the two years after the Second American War, the government had been a capsized vessel trying to right itself on an angry sea. Too many factions were boiling up into the fray, and a temporary administration decided that a bipartisan election hearkened appropriately to antebellum tradition. 

While people stood in bread lines at Kroger and pieced together hyper-regulated internet lives on old iPhones, the media rolled out the red carpet for the number one event to make American citizens feel back in control of their lives again.

Advertisements flashed for a new kind of preliminary debate. This time, the candidates were only allowed to state verified statistics to persuade their audiences: no ad hominem attacks or half-baked emotional appeals. How were they going to ensure that? 

By giving Leigh the responsibility instead. She had been selected at random through a public lottery draw from what the government claimed to be thousands of qualified candidates, and then volun-told to attend basic refresher courses on Rhetoric and Politics. 

Her directions thereafter were even more surrealistic: to download a soundboard and, anytime one of the candidates said something that was not verifiable fact, to click the loudest buzzer sound and explain to the audience why the statement was not powered by pure logic.

Rejected Wedding Vows

Reading over the translation of the prayer that will be read here today, 

there are a lot of adjectives that people use to describe God that I would 

also use to describe you within the context of our relationship: glorified, 

extolled, honored, adored and lauded. 

But working as a high school English teacher, I remember the deans

told us never to use adjectives to describe how you want someone to 

be or act, because adjectives can be interpreted many ways and are even 

unnecessary a lot of of the time. Using this logic, whoever translated the 

prayer should really receive an F if they turned it in as a poem for class. 

Sorry: I’m not changing the grade.

What does it mean to glorify or honor someone? To laud someone? 

These are all almost exact synonyms, which makes the grade worse.

As a teacher, when you draft the rules for how someone should be or act, 

you also have to word it using positive actions and modeling. Here, the 

English-language prayer fares just fine. However, what does it look like to extol 

or to praise? What does it look like to honor? I do not know this exactly, 

and neither, it seems, does God, because we haven’t gotten that much 

concrete feedback on what we’ve done thus far, and if it were really good, 

it’s kind of polite that he would say something.

Feminists like us don’t like the idea of honoring or extolling men: for us, it’s really not en vogue for the foreseeable future. Anyone is free to worship any person they like, but doing that within the context of our modern world just gives us the ick, and it’s because when we think of these verbs we imagine the action of bowing low and kissing rings. Of cooking and mundane life tasks assigned to those who apparently don’t matter as much. Of our own forced humility, whatever humility means. Of the breaking of some divine code, because tradition says you can only worship the divine. And when you lift up the other person to the divine, it’s implied that you then put down others to establish the contrast, that one is extolled and the other the martyr.

But I still said at the beginning that in the context of our 

relationship I actually do laud you, glorify you, and adore

you. But I won’t put myself down.

This looks like never taking for granted any time you spend 

with me or anything you do for me. In return, I will do most 

things you ask me to do and support any life you choose to 

lead. Not because I am your slave or your pet, but because 

I trust you deeply. And I will care for you, not like for a child 

or a dog, but maybe like a hybrid: a dog-child. And I will never 

call you a silly name and mean it, and I will 

protect your dignity around others like it’s blown out of glass.

I promise each day I will look at you and feel a burning in my chest, 

whether caused by deep love or a mixture of general malaise and 

deep-fried food.

That being said, maybe the prayer is not so bad. If we can do for 

others a fraction for what we do for those we honor and extol, human 

or whatever, the world will be a better place. I now vow to treat you with 

this divine kindness, and to always be gentle and good to you, because 

it is what you show me and others, and that is what I truly honor in you.