Feeling Fucked Up

I want to say that I found Etheridge Knight’s poem “Feeling Fucked Up” moving and am glad it was in The Sun. One person’s blasphemy can be another’s holiness.

To Name Withheld [Correspondence, January 2020], who demanded The Sun issue an apology to all Christians for publishing Etheridge Knight’s poem “Feeling Fucked Up” [Dog-Eared Page, September 2019]: Please speak for yourself only. As a Christian minister, I read Knight’s impassioned plea to have his lover back and felt my heart break open. His poem aches with the knowledge of what he lost — a loss so complete as to make everything else irrelevant.

In this holiday season, when Christians claim that God came to the world in the form of Jesus — amidst the stench of the stable, to a young, scandalized mother — I am reminded that none of us needs to protect the holiness of God. Instead we would do well to allow poets’ words to break our hearts.