Kathleen Rooney
Nonfiction
Whatever else He is or was, I bet Jesus Christ gives really good hugs.
Anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi—the year of our Lord. The year of our misery, followed by a year of still more misery.
Do you call them water striders or Jesus bugs?
Do you feel terror at His coming to destroy error incarnate?
Everybody thinks this about their favorite celebrities, but I truly believe that Christ and I could be friends.
Not originally a name but a title, Christ comes from the Greek for anointed one.
A name both sacred and profane, every time I say it, I feel it’s in vain—as in without success or result.
Just think: the raw charisma of Christ. The way he cannot help but to love us.
Every Christmas Eve, I wish him the purest birthday, surrounded by trees.
Imagine Jesus throwing snowballs. Imagine Jesus freaking out. Imagine Jesus—healer, savior—on his heels, saving up for a vacation.
What is it to be Christless? How about Christlike? Andres Serrano describes his Piss Christ as a serious work of Christian art. What it symbolizes, he says, “is the way Christ died: the blood came out of him but so did the piss and the shit. Maybe if Piss Christ upsets you, it’s because it gives some sense of what the crucifixion actually was like.”
Christ as an oath or strong exclamation, punctum of obscenity punctuating the ages! Minced into infinite mild variations: “Zounds!” as short for “By his wounds!” Crikey! Cripes! Judas Priest! Jiminy Christmas, why is Christ on that cracker?
Good writing leaves something for the imagination to complete: Jesus H. Christ.
Why is it almost always the Anti-Christ when, more often than not, it’s just plain Christ?
Irish folklore holds that the Son of God was manly and perfect in all his proportions; thus, he alone of all mortal men stood six feet tall, no more, no less.
A mother’s child and a child of God, like the rest of us.
Author’s Note on Christ:
This manuscript is the result of a self-imposed practice in April of 2021 in which I got up early every morning, meditated on a word from the anonymous 16th-century poem “Westron Wynde,” then wrote.
Even when one of the words in the poem repeats, each of the 30 pieces remains unique, but together they create a unified whole: a record of what it was like to be alive and attentive during a fleeting span of time. Like the brief poem they take as their jumping-off point, these pieces—simultaneously goofy and serious—contemplate wind and rain, love and yearning, embodiment and spirituality. They testify to my adoration of this anonymous author, one whose life and history we will never uncover, but who has captured something enchanting nevertheless.
O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
~Anonymous, 16th Century
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press and her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, came out in September 2023. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.
Photo Credit: Annelise Freeze is an environmental, nonsense, and experimental poet. She is a master’s student at University of Colorado – Boulder, studying Creative Writing – Poetry and instructing Creative Writing. She is currently a poetry editor for the undergraduate magazine of CU Boulder: Timber. She received her undergraduate degree at Texas State University with a BA in English (Concentration on Creative Writing) and Minor in Philosophy. Her poems and photography have been published by Persona.
L'Esprit Literary Review 