Made Man by Jendi Reiter
Jendi Reiter's latest poetry collection, Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022), was featured in Q Spirit's Top 34 LGBTQ Christian Books of the Year. Lesbian minister and inclusion activist Kittredge Cherry curates this website for queer-themed and affirming spiritual artwork.
Kitt says of Made Man, "Female-to-male transition and gay identity are explored, often through the angle of Christian theology and culture, in this queer poetry collection. Literary style illuminates unexpected juxtapositions such as the Nicene Creed as interpreted by Frankenstein and an astronaut taking communion on the moon."
Please enjoy this poem from the book, first published in Ruminate Magazine. Purchase the book at Little Red Tree or Massive Bookshop.
Buzz Aldrin Takes Communion on the Moon
I don't believe I will rise again
like a wafer in an astronaut's glove,
flimsy disc set against the real
delicious zero of infinite black.
Know these words you read were put in my mouth
like the sticky dough the Irish priests
presented as a god's body to bent-down children.
I'm bones with my arms around bones
of my granddaughter in a scorched field,
dismembered a quarter-century past
suing to block the men of NASA
from forcing their god on the moon.
Lovely indifference of radio waves,
carrying alike the claiming words of man
and me,
"Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the most hated
woman in America,"
which is to say, a woman,
like the Statue of Liberty.
When your children don't slay
the heathen and the lamb
by daily recitation in school
it's me you could thank, if I wasn't ashes.
That suit-inflated Presbyterian
is still out there rhapsodizing about low-gravity wine
curling up the side of his chalice
gracefully as a teenage centerfold.
When you look up tonight
into the cold black sea of light-years
don't think of my son
or the flames he imagines licking
my vanished soul,
but praise the dust
of rocks so far-off no foot
will ever stamp it with small theories,
and let it, because unreachable,
be heaven enough.
