BENJAMIN BELLAS currently lives in Miami, Florida. His work is forthcoming, or has been featured, in Puerto del Sol, Redivider, LIT, Hunger Mountain, Jet Fuel Review, The Pinch, and Fives: A Companion to Denver Quarterly, amongst others.
¹ My ravishing amateur pastors, we were born fast tractors on fire; a thick mix of mud, diesel and rust– red paint bubbling up, boiled milk, charcoaled barn wood.
² We suckled the slick mud from mother earth when they invented glistening machines to fill with it.
³ We stepped on the pedal and invented new speeds, we pulled the cord and found sounds so loud—so loud & cacophonous yet the Lord still ignores us.
⁴ I say Cummins Diesel®; I say Case International®; I say John Deere®, Kitten, I say Caterpillar®.
⁵ In this land of cattails we flutter like butterflies past stagnant water, broken down augers, & bullet-riddled cars once used for target practice by our teen-aged booze-addled fathers.
⁶ Our appliance graveyards are our most cherished autobiographers, white goods preserved for posterity like modest versions of the Svalbard
seed vault.
⁷ We standby, bone-weary, Bobcats® ready for the sole purpose of exhuming each industrial promise that has betrayed us.
⁸ My superfluous spirits, when will we tire of shoveling a hole the size of ourselves?
⁹ My minxy masochists, you think penance is total bliss; amiright?
¹⁰ Well, I think about grip.
¹¹ I think about holding; I think about traction, triggers & friction.
¹² I think about pliers touching electric fencing; I think about a crescent wrench and knuckle-splitting slippage.
¹³ Where I come from we have our own koan, “The only tool handle that matters is the way a broken bottle fits in the hand.”
¹⁴ My fellow philistines, I’ve come to believe that if ever we witness the second coming, it will be the first & last time {hey-Zeus} ever bothered to show his face in these ole haunts.
¹⁵ Last evening standing amongst the dusky aromatics of hot earth drawn out into rows of freshly planted soy, I saw the sky slowly close its eyelid to reveal phosphenes.
¹⁶ So often it seems the most spiritual photographs are of what is trapped behind the lens—the tufts of hair, the skull matter, the sinew.
¹⁷ My lunch buckets of platelets and plasma, I welcome you here today to wipe the blood off of your cameras.
¹⁸ I welcome you here to see through glittering NASDAQ abstractions; come; use your tongue, together let us say, “handcrafted.”
¹⁹ I’ve been demanded to work the Lord’s favorite muscle unlovingly on semi-monthly occasions—when my mouth is too timid for the Lord’s bawdy diction to fit.
²⁰ My working stiffs, when a carpenter’s hands stuff enormous lengths of lumber into the starving orifice of a planer, this is how we pray; this is how we cry, “hold me my father.”
²¹ My dear heavenly fodder, who art in heaven, I wonder why we must be born into & exit the animal kingdom as the draft horses, the mules, the oxen?—all of our bodies prized precisely for their strength & inability to demand fair compensation.
²² Once, on vacation, my intoxicated father admonished me, “life where we live has made us little more than automated gristmills, we’ve developed a taste not for the grain or the flour, but only the grinding.”
²³ My trusted cabinet of spices & seasonings, in the evening there is a world that is a companion to our own; a base existence where starlight fights to pinpoint the vein of a decaying leaf through the clogged forest canopy.
²⁴ You see, when I was a boy I had fury, but no aim; I mowed down rows of pine saplings planted by my parents at the back of their property in an attempt to adjust my wage ceiling.
²⁵ Somewhere, I guarantee, humans stand lined up & learning how to fall more gracefully, but it isn’t here.
²⁶ Here, we are casually processed, packed, labeled, & shipped to places like Benning, Lejeune, Lackland, Parris Island—where we learn that the only difference between a tourniquet & noose is location, location, vocation.
²⁷ I say then, let us root here where our ancestry settled, let us resolve ourselves to become stinging nettles awaiting our next taste of unsuspecting ankles.
²⁸ My fair skinned traditions, the only luxury the Lord ever afforded us is patience—for we will always have no where to go, and no one to be.
Discarded Sermon Ten
DISCARDED SERMON TEN
¹ My ravishing amateur pastors, we were born fast tractors on fire; a thick mix of mud, diesel and rust– red paint bubbling up, boiled milk, charcoaled barn wood.
² We suckled the slick mud from mother earth when they invented glistening machines to fill with it.
³ We stepped on the pedal and invented new speeds, we pulled the cord and found sounds so loud—so loud & cacophonous yet the Lord still ignores us.
⁴ I say Cummins Diesel®; I say Case International®; I say John Deere®, Kitten, I say Caterpillar®.
⁵ In this land of cattails we flutter like butterflies past stagnant water, broken down augers, & bullet-riddled cars once used for target practice by our teen-aged booze-addled fathers.
⁶ Our appliance graveyards are our most cherished autobiographers, white goods preserved for posterity like modest versions of the Svalbard seed vault.
⁷ We standby, bone-weary, Bobcats® ready for the sole purpose of exhuming each industrial promise that has betrayed us.
⁸ My superfluous spirits, when will we tire of shoveling a hole the size of ourselves?
⁹ My minxy masochists, you think penance is total bliss; amiright?
¹⁰ Well, I think about grip.
¹¹ I think about holding; I think about traction, triggers & friction.
¹² I think about pliers touching electric fencing; I think about a crescent wrench and knuckle-splitting slippage.
¹³ Where I come from we have our own koan, “The only tool handle that matters is the way a broken bottle fits in the hand.”
¹⁴ My fellow philistines, I’ve come to believe that if ever we witness the second coming, it will be the first & last time {hey-Zeus} ever bothered to show his face in these ole haunts.
¹⁵ Last evening standing amongst the dusky aromatics of hot earth drawn out into rows of freshly planted soy, I saw the sky slowly close its eyelid to reveal phosphenes.
¹⁶ So often it seems the most spiritual photographs are of what is trapped behind the lens—the tufts of hair, the skull matter, the sinew.
¹⁷ My lunch buckets of platelets and plasma, I welcome you here today to wipe the blood off of your cameras.
¹⁸ I welcome you here to see through glittering NASDAQ abstractions; come; use your tongue, together let us say, “handcrafted.”
¹⁹ I’ve been demanded to work the Lord’s favorite muscle unlovingly on semi-monthly occasions—when my mouth is too timid for the Lord’s bawdy diction to fit.
²⁰ My working stiffs, when a carpenter’s hands stuff enormous lengths of lumber into the starving orifice of a planer, this is how we pray; this is how we cry, “hold me my father.”
²¹ My dear heavenly fodder, who art in heaven, I wonder why we must be born into & exit the animal kingdom as the draft horses, the mules, the oxen?—all of our bodies prized precisely for their strength & inability to demand fair compensation.
²² Once, on vacation, my intoxicated father admonished me, “life where we live has made us little more than automated gristmills, we’ve developed a taste not for the grain or the flour, but only the grinding.”
²³ My trusted cabinet of spices & seasonings, in the evening there is a world that is a companion to our own; a base existence where starlight fights to pinpoint the vein of a decaying leaf through the clogged forest canopy.
²⁴ You see, when I was a boy I had fury, but no aim; I mowed down rows of pine saplings planted by my parents at the back of their property in an attempt to adjust my wage ceiling.
²⁵ Somewhere, I guarantee, humans stand lined up & learning how to fall more gracefully, but it isn’t here.
²⁶ Here, we are casually processed, packed, labeled, & shipped to places like Benning, Lejeune, Lackland, Parris Island—where we learn that the only difference between a tourniquet & noose is location, location, vocation.
²⁷ I say then, let us root here where our ancestry settled, let us resolve ourselves to become stinging nettles awaiting our next taste of unsuspecting ankles.
²⁸ My fair skinned traditions, the only luxury the Lord ever afforded us is patience—for we will always have no where to go, and no one to be.
¹ My dollar-thin delegates, proof of our irrelevance can be found in the fact that the good Lord has yet to assasinate us.
² I have often favored disobedience in my feeble attempts to gain greater prominence in the eyes of our patient savior.
³ This morning, I ripped out my cable wires, got rid of the internet, and grew an eight inch erection; I dropped to my knees and sucked the sugar sap right from the taps of maples.
⁴ For the Lord operates in sweet and spoiled ways, but always demands that we approach his milky majesty blindfolded with mouths wide open; always with our tongue and lips first.
⁵ My Sunday morning mortgage-backed securities, we are removed from the fields every day that we wake and get ready for work—any entity that dictates a body’s direction is honestly just another weapon.
⁶ My flock, my brethren, if god had never given birds wings, they would only be his ammunition.
⁷ Let the lord above bless us with just such stoic insensitivity, for what we want is nothing more than to prolong the plunging tonight.
⁸ Oh commander of cuckolding, give us the lidocaine-aided stamina to go long and strong on our next planned rumspringa.
⁹ We want every weekend sales convention capped with a ride far off into the evening; bareback, saddled, lassoing capital.
¹⁰ We want to be four limbs of ambling freedom in the Miami Beach Fontainebleau conference room; just one fucking evening unrestrained, fucked up, and high on the praise of social media—I’m talking monetization.
¹¹ We want to stain spreadsheets so fully they need be burned out of embarrassment.
¹² We want to moan, we want to hollar, we want to scale up your funds, your sales, your staff; Oh father!
¹³ My omnipotent bondholder, compel us into unending thrusts as some kind of punishment for being so fully enthralled with another prophet’s margins.
¹⁴ Give us your agency, give us your power, give us your cum at one thousand miles per hour.
¹⁵ Dear god, is this a good time to speak to thee about growing up with an insatiable hunger?
¹⁶ Like many of you, I was born into a thimble; a draft horse into the animal class surrounded by river rock, thick smoke, lady ferns, hammock rope, dappled moss, garden hoes, fireworks, broken lawnmowers.
¹⁷ Lord, we only bankrupt what we love because we demand so much of what soothes us.
¹⁸ Oh Lord, please, we are waiting for you to come and correct us; your redirection only makes our recidivism a more urgent & erotic choice.
¹⁹ Lord, let us holler “Take me to the oldest apple tree in the world so I might ask which kinds of bees still get it’s blossoms all hot & bothered!”
²⁰ You see, I was born molten and poured to form, crafted by the fertile valley that cradled and raised me.
²¹ You see, I wanna be stainless-steel collared for you my Lord; an automated robot built to milk, cuddle and fuck; a ring finger girdled in order to bear more fruit for my father.
²² My dearly beloved, an apple for breakfast leaves a whole day of temptation left to taste.
²³ For the Lord tells us that when we dispose of his nurturing gifts, the mealy core becomes immaterial.
²⁴ My peeled skins, when we bury any fruits of the valley, what we commit to the earth is not a body, but an effigy of our desires.
²⁵ And what the good Lord never advertises, is the same thing my family failed to mention once the factory finished the job on my grandfather.
²⁶ My sallow proletarians, later, in a dream, he came to me and imparted a single maxim, “The thing about being a pallbearer, Ben, is once you pick up that coffin, you never cease to feel the weight of it.”
Discarded Sermon Eight
DISCARDED SERMON EIGHT
¹ My dollar-thin delegates, proof of our irrelevance can be found in the fact that the good Lord has yet to assasinate us.
² I have often favored disobedience in my feeble attempts to gain greater prominence in the eyes of our patient savior.
³ This morning, I ripped out my cable wires, got rid of the internet, and grew an eight inch erection; I dropped to my knees and sucked the sugar sap right from the taps of maples.
⁴ For the Lord operates in sweet and spoiled ways, but always demands that we approach his milky majesty blindfolded with mouths wide open; always with our tongue and lips first.
⁵ My Sunday morning mortgage-backed securities, we are removed from the fields every day that we wake and get ready for work—any entity that dictates a body’s direction is honestly just another weapon.
⁶ My flock, my brethren, if god had never given birds wings, they would only be his ammunition.
⁷ Let the lord above bless us with just such stoic insensitivity, for what we want is nothing more than to prolong the plunging tonight.
⁸ Oh commander of cuckolding, give us the lidocaine-aided stamina to go long and strong on our next planned rumspringa.
⁹ We want every weekend sales convention capped with a ride far off into the evening; bareback, saddled, lassoing capital.
¹⁰ We want to be four limbs of ambling freedom in the Miami Beach Fontainebleau conference room; just one fucking evening unrestrained, fucked up, and high on the praise of social media—I’m talking monetization.
¹¹ We want to stain spreadsheets so fully they need be burned out of embarrassment.
¹² We want to moan, we want to hollar, we want to scale up your funds, your sales, your staff; Oh father!
¹³ My omnipotent bondholder, compel us into unending thrusts as some kind of punishment for being so fully enthralled with another prophet’s margins.
¹⁴ Give us your agency, give us your power, give us your cum at one thousand miles per hour.
¹⁵ Dear god, is this a good time to speak to thee about growing up with an insatiable hunger?
¹⁶ Like many of you, I was born into a thimble; a draft horse into the animal class surrounded by river rock, thick smoke, lady ferns, hammock rope, dappled moss, garden hoes, fireworks, broken lawnmowers.
¹⁷ Lord, we only bankrupt what we love because we demand so much of what soothes us.
¹⁸ Oh Lord, please, we are waiting for you to come and correct us; your redirection only makes our recidivism a more urgent & erotic choice.
¹⁹ Lord, let us holler “Take me to the oldest apple tree in the world so I might ask which kinds of bees still get it’s blossoms all hot & bothered!”
²⁰ You see, I was born molten and poured to form, crafted by the fertile valley that cradled and raised me.
²¹ You see, I wanna be stainless-steel collared for you my Lord; an automated robot built to milk, cuddle and fuck; a ring finger girdled in order to bear more fruit for my father.
²² My dearly beloved, an apple for breakfast leaves a whole day of temptation left to taste.
²³ For the Lord tells us that when we dispose of his nurturing gifts, the mealy core becomes immaterial.
²⁴ My peeled skins, when we bury any fruits of the valley, what we commit to the earth is not a body, but an effigy of our desires.
²⁵ And what the good Lord never advertises, is the same thing my family failed to mention once the factory finished the job on my grandfather.
²⁶ My sallow proletarians, later, in a dream, he came to me and imparted a single maxim, “The thing about being a pallbearer, Ben, is once you pick up that coffin, you never cease to feel the weight of it. coffin, you never cease to feel the weight of it.”
Volume 15.1, Winter 25
Benjamin Bellas
