Bread and Bread

I’m starting this post on the first day of winter. It’s 70 degrees outside. I don’t know how to make sense of time any more than my LA body knows how to make sense of weather. This year we trained to become foster parents, endured our fourth disrupted adoption , and then welcomed the closest thing to a “surprise baby” that queer adoptive parents can have. I like the baby; I don’t really like surprises, because even good surprises remind me of bad ones (see: four disrupted adoptions). So discovering Joey’s sweet disposition and falling in love with him was threaded with the worst mental health period I’ve had in years. I’m good-enough now, if I get enough sleep and don’t scrutinize anything too closely. That’s why this isn’t a personal 2022 recap—that story is told in all my obtuse angsty poems below this post—but a list of what I read and watched and loved. I recently got to interview Adam Bessie, whose graphic memoir Going Remote documents the bleak business of teaching community co

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash What if we have it all wrong; God didn’t give her only son because she so loved the world but because her son loved the world and she loved her son? The question mark— does love mean holding tight or letting go, or that damn serenity prayer? If love is knowing the difference, if love is knowing,  even God is agnostic. God saw the darkness and created light, but with it, shadow. God saw war and famine, limbs severed for not meeting quotas, gaslit lovers and neglected children, the buzzing thousand paper cuts of the internet. Jesus saw hillsides strewn with poppies, tide pools bright with sea stars, kindness among strangers, decades-long marriages,  the daily comfort of a group chat.  God did not want to be right about this one. Prove me wrong, she prayed—gods pray to their own children— and show me that I haven’t created ruin that will ruin you.  After all of it—the betrayals and the blood, the cave and the miracle, God’s son comes home, though it