A useless want: All outlet and no plug,
or whatever it was the preacher called
the thing we make, my love and I, together.
A waste, a broken circuit in a wall,
no, worse than this—for who can steal from God
and live? You’re gone already, dust. You’ve thrown
Him over for a passing, mortal fraud.
I praise my mortal love. I praise their only
violation: being born a pike
who flies among the stars; I praise the tug
that keeps us tethered to our Maker, tug
the cord with which our pleasures soothe and strike.
My brain, a house of lightning and of prayer.
I dream, and kill the preacher living there.
How did this poem begin for you?
I don’t see a meaningful difference between sex and worship. At least, not in terms of how I experience either, as a genderqueer femme primarily attracted to genderqueer masculine dykes. George Herbert’s trilogy of devotional poems from the seventeenth century, “Love,” provided the perfect scaffolding for me to write my own, of which this poem is the first. I liked the strictness and flexibility of Herbert’s meter and rhyme schemes, from which I borrowed—formal constraints unyielding yet tensile as any rope. Still, this was the easy part, compared to the task of honoring a poem that many, I knew, will read as blasphemy—a likely misreading I’m at peace with. This sonnet is less an argument than it is an assertion of what simply is: Queer sex is holy. Queer desire is holy. I’ve never seen God more closely than in the eyes of a beloved who knows exactly how to love me and the body I’ve come with. Argue with the stars.