The Impenitent’s Prayer
Forgive us for not banning books,
forgive us for stocking libraries with characters long excluded from yellowed tomes,
forgive us for girls who kiss girls under diamond skies,
forgive us the limbless and patched, crones and queers, survivors of fat and conversion camps,
forgive us our pierced majoras, magenta carpet and drapes, voluptuously pregnant men,
forgive us our herculean tales of finding joy in a world that would rather erase us,
forgive us our trypophobia and Takis, our selfies and Jibbitz, our twerking and TikTok pickles,
forgive us our unquestioning support of teens who wear kitty ears and lick clean their paws during math class, filling bento boxes with kibble and using litter boxes in school bathrooms where they cover their dung with, wait - what the fuck,
forgive us for pointing out that your source is garbage, for our disgust when we click the link to find a vile antisemitic screed in purple text,
forgive us our horror when we learn the weight loss supplements are sold by a Bible-thumping platinum blonde with nine children and a closet full of golly dolls,
forgive us our emails with preferred pronouns, for cross-disciplinary consensus that the planet is flooding and burning,
forgive us for turning jollies to jelly, for choosing rainbows over steeples, for insisting on the basics of consent,
forgive us our eye roll when we hear about how better it was and how men were men and women were women and people did not suck off the teat and holidays were Christian and no one had to worry about guns that slaughter entire classrooms of children,
forgive us our unionized strippers, neuroatypicals, vegan hotdogs, chosen families, Zoom therapists, paper straws, butt plugs and fidget spinners,
forgive us for Cardi B.,
forgive us for pointing out during the Thanksgiving triple-header that when compared to the NFL, sadomasochistic sex involves less force and fewer injuries, but in the 1960s the court ruled football players were sane whereas masochists were not,
but most of all, forgive us that wild pulse of freedom when we witness your shame of us and no longer share it.