Three Tuesdays, then Election Day by the time I sit before the empty page. 

I want to write something definitive about living in this American moment; bottle some great and righteous cry buried in the middle of the country in hopes the country still moves. 

I muster only fragment after fragment, opening statements of fuller essays, late in coming should they come at all. These sad, strange proverbs land incomplete, yet say so much. Here they are, in the closest I can come to no particular order:

1. I am making Christmas travel plans, but don’t know if my country will be here come mid-December. 

2. My therapist weighs the state of things, then curses into her computer; rarely have I felt so consoled.

3. Before bed, I read myself passages by Cormac McCarthy. By daylight, I repeat a joke: I find McCarthy more optimistic than real life. (I am only ever half-joking.) At least he knows the awful beauty of thunderstorms becoming brush fires and appreciates the loneliness of evil; at least he reveres something. 

4. On our walks, I let my golden retriever in on my inner monologue.  

5. We are all one breath away from taking God’s name in vain. 

6. Driving the length of my Missouri is to witness billboards taunting you, watch billboards miss the point, wonder about people living low under these messages they elevate, so certain. 

7. My therapist is guiding me through parts work, helping me name broken accords. My soul swells at the revelation; my head wonders if any of us is ever safe enough to make use of what we’re learning.  

8. What hymns do we even sing in November? Maybe silence is more apt, something like the first measures of atonement.

9. I keep trying to break into paintings the way people in ‘90s music videos entered their TVs. Hopper’s Automat, Chagall’s The Poet Reclining, van Gogh’s Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds. I have yet to crease the canvas, but the prospect keeps me alive. 

10. Isaiah wrote of beating swords into plowshares. What do plowshares look like when the swords are intractable lies and deep fakes and tweets dripping with bile?  

11. The Reverend Dr. King wrote of white moderates, warned them of their self-sustaining danger, some 60 years ago. But it seems my people rarely read to themselves in the mirror. 

12. Lately I sit in rooms where some people doodle names for God on napkins while others are on fire. 

13. I look up the phrase Kafka-esque two, maybe three times a day to see if I’m invoking it properly; I am always right and always wrong.  

14. People who build crosses usually put other people on them. 

15. Sometimes I daydream about the faith housed inside me, about its size and hardiness. I believe I am believing in reverse; what started as a full and plumy tree is being shaved into a mustard seed.

16. Tucked inside his beloved Walden, Thoreau wrote, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” Help my unbelief. 

17. My hand baptizes the breadcrumb each Sunday. Traveling back to my seat, I whisper My only hope in life and in death. This remains the holiest moment of my week. I am both tired of the words and mean them more than ever. 

18. I cannot cry over any of this, but sense my breath always about to break into shards. 

19. Once while sitting at his feet, Kaveh Akbar illuminated when and why poets substitute another word—a woman’s name or a simple “you”—so as to address God without addressing God. In my recent essays, I keep writing to “you.” When I write to “you,” I’m writing to God, and when I write to God I’m writing about you. I swear to God. I can’t figure out any other way to keep writing. 

20. I still believe the poets get the last word.