gay girl prays for a gun

I am nineteen-years old when [I am writing this story.]<1| (transition: "dissolve")[[It's one of the smallest stories I've ever known.]] (click: ?1)[ (replace: ?1)[I am just like you. Except we are so much smaller.] ] <div class="cursor"></div>

In middle school they told us a story about a boy who took the consecrated host (the body of Christ in unleavened bread) and spat it out to throw it in the garbage can. Its journey underneath the [[bridge of his tongue]], unwrapped from plastic and prayed to in the backroom. It goes that the priest dug through C2 bottles and aluminum to get the pieces, [[hold them together, forgive,->America]] and ingest in the body once more.

America purveys me some promise [[for the sun]]. It tells me a story of the immigrant on miles, the chafe of a woman's knuckles on the aisles of clorox. My caretaker is still scared of flying, all my yayas choose the sea and the television. America serves me my country in bright yellow cafes, in evaporated milk cans, or [[with prayer]].

Years after I had stopped believing, I continued to perform the Sign of the Cross after the consecrated host. Then: in high school, where I had been indoctrinated and then lost - I one day stopped walking, nobody asked. Many times do I imagine the holy rosary in my thumb, correcting pronunciation, the adage of eternal fire repeated over and over unto me. In another at the CPA, we watch over rows and rows of Our Father's like forgiveness is an automatic act. At some point religion becomes a defense mechanism. I load myself [[as agnostic]] -- perhaps we all are. It's only years later did the repetition end; and these days I recognize with the last of my prayer and my knees on the ground did I stop thinking of gods and how they must.

We talked on the redundancy of prayer and the listnessness come mind. My friends go to worship: watch as tongues fuck the soul of the empty. Nothing else can be believed: they arch their back, [[denounce evil, repeat evil]] on this trip. In four years of the [[transfiguration]], I had never witnessed the body seized in front of me. I could only hope that god, the shepherd; counted the fleece, waited carefully for the young men, kissed their chests but only in public.

Last Easter in America at fourteen (back when we had all believed) I felt my heels unearth themselves. In those steps I wanted to fucking explode into [[a fray of white and white]] and I couldn't breathe as I thought about the Lord and Obama and the cops. (Somewhere in Florida in a suburb I can't recall) the rocks were engraved with verses and the pews shoulder-to-shoulder with all the men and women that had sinned in hats and without. My cousin came out [[as agnostic]] and I went upstairs with her. We took our shoes off and lined her trash can, dreaming of tigermilk and the skin of Mary.

My first hate crime they talked to me about boys throwing acid at girls and its now virulence to society. "The most disgusting men use their position to [[overpower women]] and get what they want." Like we can't see the mirrors left under desks. Like I went to sleep listening to god tell me how he would destroy me. All my life we grasped so tightly to the moment of creation, my birthday, my biological clock, to take and take and take.

Here the sun sets at eight and does not wait for you to rise. The prophesy goes that our men rode into the east to find peace: like stars or elegy. Joseph, in his letter, did not mention anything but the blood of the water. Or maybe he was [[forgotten again]] when the young were writing about the sea.

Over the last iteration I drew narratives of girls begging to be extinguished. [[Prophets stood->a fray of white and white]] too at the foot of the Lord. Washed his limbs and caressed them. I want to [[kiss the feet]] of my enemies. Do anything to be close and transcend when god has split the [[world apart->denounce evil, repeat evil]].

In America I watch the day come from the Starbucks glass and in the Philippines I sit with tea outside for the sunset. In both I leave empty for repetition - my life in death on the caricature of a mall.

The only questions we ask are "when did you know you didn't believe in God?". I have never heard them answer "when did you know there was one?" In the beginning I too, knew certain things. When I was a glacier. That the Mothery Mary watched [[her only penetrated]], she had never had been. Where the women before me were invaded and kept from the schoolhouse. That I reclined and let them touch something (immensely mine, but never so). Where my best friends hide cuts on their ankles, then we tell no stories. [[We paint]]. In another year the women take revenge before they return to the earth.

Our university center reports that only 13% of the undergraduate body are godless. [[Godless->for the sun]] is the empty church, my parents only allowing the disappearance in the hours I'm there. 11PM on Sunday my latest invite, the lack of binding of men and women for religion becomes a lower factor. They still sing. There's christians, a few dozen, concentrated somewhere—linked in [[the parts]] silence, parts disbelief.

Unlearning the book of revelations: strumming the muscle fibers on my legs -- playing god on floors. Barefoot, girl walks and asks me if I am okay. Chest half done, police officer knocks on my door two days before the first day of school. Wonders if I am going to kill myself. I am beloved, [[I learn this so->women are encased]] in history I am native in history my miracle is one of many. In my living I wonder who remembers my name, stops, to think, if I too - am breathing. On this morning in haven counting sorries and excuses and the letters I have left or the sound of a number, of a name declared too far again. [[I'm eating bones in my room.]]

[[Last year I marched]]. There was this history bit with my great grandfather who freed soldiers during the wartime. He took near-curdling milk by the palm and rubbed it over his wife's eyes when they came inside. The neighbors on the other hand, were pulled out. She remembered it but hesitated to revisit it: the geometry of an eye strung out, the dried, candlelit, ill. Someone tried to play dead. You could tell by their carcass less wounded, cradled so tenderly underneath her mother and the bayonette. We are so good at history. We are burying the murderer in the frontyard. We are so good at homeliness. We are known for our open arms. We are known to outstretch them, march for hours, until we collapse of exhaustion and one-by-one climb into the trenches. We are good too, at forgiveness. We are some hospitable people.

Where were you when they buried the world? I was with her, silently watching, I was with her when in the beginning she said let there be light. Let there be all the things that [[they will never hear->transfiguration]]. My citizenry never prepared me for this. Before we lived in a town that talked about [[God->denounce evil, repeat evil]] and rid all against us; we were so close to salvation.

My best friend brings magazines to schools as a way to measure time. (In Lady Bird, Saoirse Ronan puts her feet up against a closet. She and Beanie Fieldstein talk about [[masturbation and showerheads->her only penetrated]].) And we waited next to the window, holding the weight of each other under rain. And I persisted when talking to her: sinking under our silences. Then under curfew I imagined counting to infinity; telling her the first time I fucked between the last time I lived. There's Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, then Anna Kendrick on the cover. It's so much fun until we don't want to be them. It's so tender to open them up at thirteen just to become nothing at all. I think this world was made for us, wasn't? When we freshly-shaved [[women are encased]] in plastic we are building ourselves a life for the only thing we have ever known is preservation.

Yes, in the dead worlds we are happier. I wrote [[for you an elegy]], far long before I knew it was one. In it we say our vows (but here are we too afraid of permanence). You are seared and I watch it, making sure you go the way you like it. Then (I cannot stop them) they bless your body. As if by instinct. As if a prayer can undo what they had taken from you. Never fear. I remember you, softer, your unblinking, your shaking, your god-fearing when we kiss under suns. I keep you in my pocket, and [[maybe even in a prayer]].

Tendency is to say that habit forms after two months--66 days, to be exact. Habitual is my sorrow in the bedstand. We prayed for 73 days straight and I could not stop crying, every night. This was the part where I was taught to pray. How to converse with god if I want to be forgiven. This was the structure: [1. Praise the Lord.]<1| (click: ?1)[ (replace: ?1)[1. Praise the Lord. [2. Thank the Lord.]<2| ] ] (click: ?2)[ (replace: ?2)[2. Thank the Lord. [3. Ask for forgiveness.]<3| ] ] (click: ?3)[ (replace: ?3)[3. Ask for forgiveness. [4. Pray for others.]<4| ] ] (click: ?4)[ (replace: ?4)[4. Pray for others. [5. Then, pray for yourself.]<5| ] ] (click: ?5)[ (replace: ?5)[5. Then, pray for yourself. The biblical reasoning for this is that man alone is not worth anything. I was told that His crucifixion demonstrated safety from eternal death. That this was the eternal link. That [[nothing else is eternal.]] ] ]

The first time I prayed I asked for a [[flick of light]]. The first time I went outside I crawled on the street until the pavement scalded my knees. The first time I wanted something I knew it would be temporary. I was an infant incendiary and now I know what it means to experience something. I know how little it takes to care and take. When they dip your head in the holy water before you can even speak, they say they will protect you from demons. How could they say it? There, I think, I deciphered that not all in life must be good. That exposition is the [[only means of human mobility]]. Yet it was more humiliating when we masked our mouths when no one else was; because virulence is only so when they agree.

In my grandparent's house, there was a hole on the ceiling. This was, like what the Americans have, an attic of some sorts. We were to inhabit this home for many years: in rain where the mosquitoes would chase after us and nip at our bare feet, our feet ever-red from the coated brick of the living room, our names and nicknames formed here until becoming memory. It was a decade later where we delivered something up there again. It was my grandparents who died. We held a mass underneath the attic, shut the crevice with rope and bamboo. And in the night, after the priest had blessed us and fed us the body of the son who had died to [[save us from damnation]], I saw my mother's legs outstretched-- the shadow of it, at least. Pelted in dust and maggot. It was the cool blush of winter. I wondered how far the holy water could reach: I can hardly lift my hands and feel Silang. I am troubled by the house that bears witness to our coated feet, overturned palms, to sounds delicately unwrapped by the night.

[I marched when time was crumbling.]<1| I came here, body intact, undressed for tar and prepared for absolution. All I want is clarity. All I want is to carve something to become larger. When I say birdshot, I say war in the name of religion. Let me revisit Manila. Tell me about the massacre: of girls lined up on hotel walls, pretty, petite, but not punctuated enough. Tell me about cordiality. [Because to solve the war we must first learn discipline.]<3| Obedience is the first step to healing, here before we declared any emergencies. When I was younger I watched my friends swim in sewage, thumbing grains. Then I watched them shot down, somewhere in Tondo. And then I watched myself alone, speechless, carrying a knife atop an overpass—[[ready to say yes]]. (click: ?1)[ (replace: ?1)[In resolute air, [who chooses what we may breathe?]<2|] ] (click: ?2)[ (replace: ?2)[who chooses what we may breathe? I can foresee, all but in part that I should know fully.] ] (click: ?3)[ (replace: ?3)[Because to solve the war we must first learn discipline. [[Filipino mouths->kiss the feet]] are wide and greedy. Kleptomanic but born to hang up clotheslines.] ]

For 66 days I prayed. Then it was 73. Then for six years, without fail, every night I would go wrap myself in bed and pray; with my parent's television on (playing war films, usually), with the cry of my siblings. With my fingernails digging so deeply into the front of my thighs to ask for forgiveness. [[And I was sorry for everything.]] For women, for war (what they played), for our skipped meals, for the turns spent sleeping on the floor. Then, I remembered her. I remember without fail defining makeshift cities in repeating sleep. I remember living fifty more lives in the dead of the night. New mothers, new faces, new languages. I remember so desperately clutching them. Firing guns at [[daybreak/putting->We paint]] charcoal on skin. There was a life without ribs, in another the were cloaked head-to-toe. Here I found the foreigner in my bedroom. I said eternal because nothing else could be. I said so when I went blind, but only for a millennia. I said "look at this fissure" but the poem was a birdsong. Yes, it could not be deciphered. Not by anyone else. When we undressed we found no reason in doing so. But maybe in one of those lives, I had preserved this.

"I am an atheist who says his prayers." I am carrying the country on my back and saying sorry for the president. I am refining our vocabulary. Anathema means disarmament, I think, with the religion of two-thousand years of blood on their hands. Next, I know [[genuflection]] at the altar. So much that it is ingrained. (My teacher pressing his wrist on the top of my back to be proper, and bask in the fallen son of God.) I'm remembering another thing. Prehistory, maybe. I bet my daughters will at least follow and give me this. [[Phantasmal]], but not like Jesus. More like Sudarium, that of Veronica's, imprinted with the likelihood of him. For two centures we have been searching so deeply for something reminiscent of this negative. To come again, to kiss his brownness, to dissect and explain. [[All night->as agnostic]] I am repeating words, memorizing the saints and how they died. All night I am saying these prayers.

Alejandra wrote the Incarnate Word to tell me about something deeper. Yes, I am infamous and fleeting. I was birthed so wanted. Culturally, there should be something deeper about this piece: it's not just religious contempt it's me and you--bonded. The only thing I like to do is write poems for the restless. I am the embodiment, I think, of my mother. But only when she was onstage, reading passages from Suspiria or talking about maps. They told me that when I was younger I asked so many questions. Yes, you are raw--but can you not fuck so silently? [[I talked her out of it]] and went out to our neighbors before they dropped dead. I worried about not being able to pour a bucket of ice over my face. Mom said she always felt like she was robbed. At seven I walked her through the inferno, the Bible, and she politely asked me to stop. I can invent a story instead, but everything here is much more real. For you, again, this is all I do.

But then I kissed my traitor in the cheek, my obsession collapsing on myself. No revelation could explain this. In America, I laughed at this girl who cheated. Who looked beneath cathedrals and bared herself onstage. Sometime I saw her on the pews in Alabang, propped her unshaved pubes on the face of boys who wrote their ten-year plan in email drafts. How can a man suffer like that? How can a woman carry the weight of a century with ease? I search for the poet again. For two dollar chapbooks plated at my doorstep I very well remember the auditorium's echoes. She knows it all. The ghost in the backrooms. To fuck on the third floor. To spit in the middle of seats and skip communion for nine different reasons. When they wait and carry the multicolored cellophane wrapping around the face of Jesus, I wonder who cleans our mess. They are the sober ones too. Me and you channeling in this mess, me and you chasing cigarettes and wondering who is closer to some semblance of success. My body is yours too, your tight cunt and the clumps of mascara. beer in your hands warming so you can get in the urge. If I speak, it is only a diversion. It is only the preacher, the protestant, the peacetime that can only ever harbor this.

And then I was old before god was young again. She, dessicated on sight, with the flesh melting over her chest she just asked to be wiped. The Shroud of Turin is a centuries old cloth carrying the image of a crucified man. Some believe it depicts the image of Jesus of Nazareth and the fabric is His burial shroud. So I took her, oxide and all, the particles of dust for perfect microscopy years later. This assemblage. One virgin to one sacrifice to one teenage girl cutting herself with a knife to make the world a better place. [[Maybe Jesus->only means of human mobility]] wept here. Maybe I could cry like Jesus. [[I want for once to be holy when I am nothing.]] Theoretically, I have no more influence. That is to say, I am wiped from everything when I rest. No identity between the space, all verbage lost, my appendage binded or cremated. Can we pay vigil to this doctrine? Or at least, salvage the woman and her parking tickets somewhere in the suburbs. Or the cities. Or the majority world. Or the one where every single day children are dying and Jesus does nothing but watch. He is too busy with the taxpayer, with the kiss, with Judas caressing his cheek as He knows He is about to die.

Soft-spoken, if you have yet to guess. In every hotel room there is a Bible in a drawer. There is probably also a fuckton of semen on the sheets. If you are truly unlucky, there might be the remnants of pubes or blood. Ssomewhere. When I rub salt on these stains my suffering is quiet. My loneliness calms me, or so does the seventeen-story drop. I am underlining the book of revelations: where there are more footnotes than actual words. I could probably predict a better end. Anyway, the body decomposes. The blood is flushed down the tub drain. There are no four beasts who come and save him. There are too many stories of people who were allowed to take, and take. There are so many women on the streets, naked, that you have yet to reach. [[And what am I to do?]] I am no good, the Bible does not have an answer to this; it is so obsessed with ends. Immortality is the next big thing, but only if you are one of those making the offering of gripping. If you like consesquence or better yet, fatality. Or better yet, the labor of heaven descent into concurrency with hell: for we know there is only so much space below what must be closer.

Gaze perception is precise. You feel this piercing, shallow rolling of someone looking at you. This is a special kind of sensitivity that has taken millions of years of evolution. It is intimate. Your mother identifies you in the line at school, and you know she is there and run towards. her. Your sister watches you in the swimming pool, and the depth of her gaze is almost as potent as the chlorine. When you are thinking of taxes and disease, you are positive no one is around you. Then, in a church past the New Haven Green, it builds up. I am feeling every abrasion, the chisel of my bones and the exhume beside me. There is a legacy here that I have yet to know of. [[I'm nineteen and this is the only story I know->when]]. You are pacifying the story of severance, you are unlearning what they had taught you yet you remember so distinctly the feel of all their hands. Watch this: the salt is indespensable; it is only the ritualist holding their breath, telling you to count to three. When you are drowning, the city beckons itself over you. And then you forgive. You forgive the streams of water and what the tidal wavess have given. You forgive everything that has encased you, the thighs whiting and the muscles in your legs seizing right before your organs. It is magic, I think, to feel the cosmic results of your drowning: the impossibility of being, the tightness of your calves, and then the holy bluntness and all the men who have died to cheapen your sorrows. I am captive. I am assigned to this tenement, to the portrait of a mouth, to swallowing and spitting and suckling and suckling.

When did you know you loved women? Did you know it in your mother's crevice, after she told you that god hates fags? Or in the video of the church, where the men topple statues of Joseph before setting the aisle on fire? Did you know it in lace and promise--like confirmation of all our worst fears? This is nothing out of the ordinary. Did you know it like your choleric tendency, like how you want everyone to speak on-command? Or maybe slowly, towards abandonment, when you're writing and have your thights tightening under blanket--in duress, thinking about girls again? Or maybe you are thirsty to make a woman cry. It's not easy, not without laceration. You drive her upside down, near-uneventful until she engenders you story. Something you have never heard. When you are listening, bereft of touch she is anytihng but gentle. I am there at the summit, asking you for a name: this, we know might be anything but love. And then together you could trace the Atlantic. You could see under the sky what decades have buried you. There are no altar girls. There are only cities, wives, then widows. Sometimes we masqueraded as refugees; other times, we shave our heads. But there is always another boundary to us and god: it is to stop us from being the lawless. It is so we can bear children, bounded before desolation. What if the womb is uninhabitable? What if the women in the battlefield are tired of splicing the uterus, the bladder, then the intestine, rested on a bowl? And then, the man comes out. Then the woman is now allowed to die.

Thank you to the ravenous body. To the minefield. To liberation. When there were three young children climbing up hilltop to see Mary in August, I wonder what it felt like to run back home. It must have been irrational. To claim she was in your land, to be a woman messiah, or to hear prayer aloud for the first time. This is not the first. There are thousands of [[Marian apparitions,]] and many of them have burned believers. [[Fátima, specifically, came six times.]]

And then the embers, the godness arson, and all the dead before me. And I watched [[Mary bring me to hell]] in a memory. The black age was under the everlasting world as we marched under the congregation. I saw in August, the passage where bodies go. The secret of divinity is entangled in the girl. Woman, I am burning. Bring me the blackened, an ashtray; let me carry the sins you have left here. Let me write my own passage. Gather me the verse of the dead, a brutality, or a demon opening your mouth. Let me ask: why are the sinners so transparent? Why is remission never permanent? Eden brought us here, Mary, so of forlorn earth god must have had lesser plans. For your oratory how do I speak of radiance when the children are burning? Why must I weep and be stoned as your son? Christ uncrucified, why must I believe in sin? So I lifted the veil and kissed the demon; and without her I danced to the gods that understand time. I am still with you, Mary. I am still with the men in hell, I give them the bodies they never had and the forgiveness without god. I know now, scavenging the fields, in not a thousand tongues but one, of the damnation. Of all the women before me.

We are Manila running gently. So we are about to leave the earth. Outside I give my clothes to the Protestant, with no evidednce of it. "<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53850/authors-prayer" target="_blank">Even sleep is a prayer, Lord, I will praise your madness</a>". Then let my body speak for the women of the herd. Let me smell the crisis of my city; the fumigation before my father was buried with the fork and the war story. And let me draw triangles on the fault: let my mother stockpile water, a candle, and some sticks collected. Then in the rain the newsmen tell us to carry these buckets too. Bring it up the mountain. Bring it to Tondo. Sit with me on the traintracks. This is the only place quiet enough for us to hear what the preacher is saying in the Old Cathedral. And one day, she says, I may even get married. I may do more than sell there. And then the trolleys pass.

After the Manila Massacre—The Manila massacre killed over a hundred thousand in the 1940s. [[Then in February 1945->maybe even in a prayer]] even in prayer]], seventy priests and refugees were killed in the still-standing church in De La Salle College, Manila. [[The past year was a century, too.]]

In the third address, I made up a prayer to the inimitable god. One for forgiveness and will, another for rescue to one day know the unknowable. I am [[here brief and quick->Last year I marched]]: as a child I was lied to as nothing lives forever but grief. I'm here, lingering, with Paul and the Saints, in a garden borne of death from youth waiting for reparations and some sort of conclusion. I am 19 when I begin to plan funerals and buy ornaments for my sisters; [[I am life absolute without resurrection.]]

Contrition And like everyone I prayed to take the sin out of me, father, and forgive me, but what if it is all of me— and where shall it go? If I love a woman like I love the Lord, I must be a good follower. I must know what it means to follow scripture when I spell it for her in places [[the god cannot reach]]. I am sorry also, for the temperament: how many times have you heard a child say sorry for saying "fuck", for saying "bad words" or for not knowing the difference between homing instinct and chase? Sorry, father. We smell like incense and America. Like my cousin who carried the casket back home four-years pregnant. And each year, how must you track my progress? How do you judge these recitations? [[How often must I come back to apologize->for you an elegy]] for the girls? And bless this gospel that I know like the back of my hand, from all the new mecca and promise that naivety hid me from. Guttural, really, was the type of taste when we swallow and lick our mouths: fresh after the sin. Then I do penance. Then I suffer. And then I avoid the feeling again. Do you say your own name when you pray anymore, father? I want to tuck the parts of me that are ill and without flesh, like what god had done with the beast's horns before he came onto the earth in the endtimes.

Chiara always stands near belfry, right before the Church begins. Where Mary carrying Jesus is acidified and [[grasping->for you an elegy]] tightly in rock. This is the only way we know how to pray. I confess to almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault in my thoughts and in my words .. I remember only what I must say. The Pastor seems to demand nothing from God what men can easily give. I wonder if my father himself too, could play god when he stands on our balcony, under the moonlight, where his skin flickers unto white.

And on the third day she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose. And she rose.

Double-click this passage to edit it.

And loosely I rivaled the sand, I was it–the dust at the buttom of the function. I became one: memoir for infinity. An abscess pooling at the bottom of the earth. One girl walks a schoolyard, skips over the world in damnation. The moment of abandoned relief when the commandments decry spell of hope once more as genuine liberation for the generation for the millennia to come. I cannot live a thousand years. I cannot live two thousand years. I cannot live three thousand years. I cannot live four thousand years. I cannot live five thousand years. I must live til the end with the beloved.

[[And all the men were reborn.->Marian apparitions,]]

Remember when we watched the kid headfirst down chapel doors, glass crashing His blood spilling and they almost sent us home for the day. Or when the torrents come we wait hours together in a draining room as they come and go. I first held a girl's hand (not like a friend hold, not forced, not to feel like something else, not false– I hope) when the night school kids came in and we watched them through the door [[past the 6PM rosary]] incident to God, you would say.

On paper, you draw me cities and leave the miles between them. You roll dice, promise me time, move seats closer. Your hair goes box red in the summer, only at the ends–I catch you in between words. One day, you promise I can come over to your house; open and at the other end of the neighborhood. I see how you share space and everything makes sense. Your slats comb downwards and the deck decomposing makes you carry flowers over every stained portrait.

Tenth grade or something my friend came to school and told us that she could make herself cum! I was so pleased, for her, for pleasure, for the idea of womanhood, for release, for our boyfriends, for our want of girlfriends and the never having, for what turns us on until it doesn't, for the kink lists, for the suicide notes, for the journals we exchange, for the times I'lll be able to do this with one hand and then never any way again.