who said so?

November 27, 2025

i feel that place inside me and it feels like going home. a stuffy room full of faces of judgement. mouths made up with lipstick tinged with bitterness muttering curses in ukrainian. 

my grandmother and her sisters stuck together in pews and church dresses, itchy pantyhose and patent leather shoes, listening to someone talk about jesus and the saints. going home to be beaten by a father who also talked about jesus and the saints. 

later, my grandmother took me to that room of judgement of lipstick frowns and i also learned about jesus and the saints and i also went home to be beaten, except she was the one doing the beating.  this woman and her rosaries and photos of the sickly martyr christ screaming over top of televangelists on tv or old episodes of jerry springer. 

i hated the stuffy rooms and the voices of tv preachers and yet, now, it just feels like home to me. i know these rooms and these voices and this place. 

alone in my room surrounded by candles and bones and books on the occult, i listen to old religious vhs tapes and it reminds me of being a child.  i get sentimental in church parking lots and when i find old crosses at the thrift shop. they make me think about trauma and violence butted up against absolution and i guess that’s just how the world is and probably always has been. 

people shoot up drugs now outside the old church and my grandmother and all the other lipstick mouths i remember are all dead and i never wore lipstick myself so i don’t dare darken that doorway anymore because it smells like piss and pierogis. 

jesus is lord?  who said so?