That collective moan

in Greater White Stone Church

had a body to it that I saw

as a child and mistook

for love itself, built from the silk

of sobs in the sanctuary.

The moan a language that is said to

confuse the Devil out of knowing

your business was itself a confusion

of visions, the coming into being

of liminality itself for neither joy

nor solace triumphed in the relent-

less catechisms, the wails

that were pure pain tossed up

to the ceiling or rocked from the gut

to the floor. “Lay your burdens down,”

said the pastor but they would not

stay down. Every Sunday, hymnals

sopped up sorrow after sorrow

that had no navigable ending.

Every Sunday, my grandmother

called upstairs to my mother

to see if we were going to service

with her, and we did, and I saw

the mostly elderly congregation

greet her as “Sister Williams”—and

I remember how, when I was a teenager, church

no longer a pastime, my grandmother

died and no one who loved Jesus

came to send her on her way to Him

or visit her in her living illness. Limbo,

purgatory, the church the gateway to

nonexistence, a holding cell for the deceased,

the wanting to die. That you can be clean

does not mean you can be made clean.

Saint Liminal visited last night

in their fog body that smelled of perfumes

and back of the throat, frozen birds

that paraded atop women’s heads

and funk in a neck dip’s decanter.

I asked, “What happened to joy?”

It had been many mornings. It was

supposed to come then. Saint Liminal

tilted their head to their shoulder and spoke

from their ear in the voice of three octaves

striking the air at once. They said, “Hennessy

drips from the poplars this crucial

conflict this hay in the middle

of the harm feeding the beast in this burning

barn in the naysayers veins this history

dripping in the Hennessy this blunt

incantation leathering thick black lips

this shoe-shine grin this

If you grin I’ll let you live this

I’m alive and I’m enough half-

lie this loving and living

off the dead this happiness in spite

of this happiness in spite this

mistake that you sing because

you happy and because you free and not

because grief has a song

this wingless sparrow

for an eyeless god this singing

when Tim survived Chicago but was shot

in Cali somewhere this singing and he still

dead these Black scholars demanding joy

laughing to the bank with stolid books

written with an inflexible air of moralistic angst

with hands that push out push away the Tims

and Tim’s body the only prelude you know

this activist laughing face-smashed

on concrete on a police car’s hood

and the cops laughing and they laughing

together this noose in a history

museum stunned in its headless gasp

this noose on your head you call

your burden your inheritance your nuance

you using Emmett Till like a mirror a muse

wearing his gin fan like a Pulitzer

this noose on the doorknob

your reflection convex in the past tense

shine they call you and you do

you grin you show your still-yours teeth

those souvenirs in the dusk

those stones marking an ever-living grave.”

And Saint Liminal straightened their head

and touched that once-talking ear

to their shoulder and spoke in rain playing

a drum, “I am the archangel draped

in pigeon feathers. I read insignias

carved into your pathos. I translate

sand sifting from top to bottom. I arrange

stars in man’s imagination to constellate

prisons for gods and maps

to an ordinary freedom. I speak

all the world’s languages lost and here

and yet to come. But when you ask

of joy’s arrival I see nothing

but a line bisecting stone and no water

leaks forth. Nothing but a wooden dog

pierced in its back with nails. I see joy

erasing the one who seeks

to be modified by it. I see the legible

scratched illegible by an always-

forthcoming validation. Joy come

in the morning. It is here

an eternal night.” When they left,

the sun had come up but joy

was still absent, which meant the sun

was not real. I grabbed a stone

and threw it at the sky.