Casey Gilfillan

You step before me, grand and gestured. Cloaked in red, you saunter into the beam with your hands pressed firmly together: palms flat. Your pupils flicker upward, linger, and then return to me.

A feathered nimbus frames you, and you are so swift as you flutter across your pulpit. The cloak flows and breaks over you, a flood of crimson in the divinity of your movement. The blood of your fabric upon me, I have no need for the chalice.

You cast away the cloth; the translucence beneath beckons me forward. I am clutching for my rosary, reaching away from my heart; I am reaching down, clawing downward.

I pray for your subversion, and you leave me on my knees waiting. I’d wait forever, listening to you chant dead languages from the book. My faith is unfaltering in the wayward angel; bare and sinister; sadistic and opulent.

I accept the body, the blood, and then surrender my own.