The world’s most elegant funeral ad, a promise that your small, uneventful life will live beyond its bones. This hunger for forever, this lust for the invisible—it’s a desperate wish not to be dust, not to be forgotten, not to be nothing. Church is a performance where holiness is a contest of virtue in pressed dress shirts and pastel dresses. If comparison is the thief of joy, then joy’s corpse lies under the altar. They count the sinners, not the casualties. The Sunday newspaper wilts beneath their coffee cups. Oh yes how horrible, God watches over them, they murmur. They pray for the children, but their compassion never leaves the pew. Reality cannot live in thoughts and prayers; only performance does, a shimmering badge of goodness sewn to the chest. The church is a fantasy with better branding, membership free if you don’t mind losing your marrow. So I’ll take my gym membership instead, at least it offers free clean showers.


 

Waverly Vernon (they/them) is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Florida currently studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their work explores politics, religious deprogramming, and trauma, transforming personal experience into connection and dialogue. What began as a personal refuge has grown into a means of connection, inviting readers to share in these explorations. They are the author of the micro chapbook “soft-skinned”, published by Bottlecap Press. Their poetry also been published by Ark Review, WIA Magazine, Wildscape Literary Journal, Creation Magazine, and Arcana Poetry Press.