​Religion stirs at 3 AM. The tendrils break loose from your arms, unravel from around your fingers, and float to the floor. Otherwise they’re curled up, snapped off in the swirl of top sheets and linen as the bed cools off, warmth and body now vacated. There’s ritual, kindled in the engine of a red Honda Odyssey, ignited in the combustion chamber, pumped out of the radio speakers. It’s paved in the roundabout and down the L shaped road from my house to Target. It dies, as does the whole of America, on the ledge of the door that the 4 AM team uses to get in. The radius of static that buzzes from the walkie on the stoop (left out for the 5 AM and 6 AM team) is insecticide to the sacred. Leave your rituals at the door, capitalism kills love.
I ought to thank it though. Capitalism is the sole proprietor of the two times I have felt love. Maybe three.
❧
In a small twin bed, inside one of the two bedrooms, in a thousand-square-foot, 1920’s style brick house, with radiators and single pane windows. Her mother’s original birch bedroom door is six steps away. Jasmine tea, crunched into slotted metal tea infusers, scalded tongues and scorched hands. Burning mugs squeezed between bare thighs as blankets were shifted and pillows thrown. Tv on that didn’t matter. Eggs and toast. Arms over, under. Breath. Sober. Socks. Skin. Tea.
Her.
❧
      On a standard issue couch, in a different old building, with boiler heating and single pane windows. Knees hugged to chest. She’s trying to hug me, crying too. Her sobbing is broken by a punctuated promise. My broken family is punctuated by me, sitting on this couch, being held.
I can’t remember if there was
tea
I don’t think there was.
 
❧
Once for a week in June.
            Closest to religious, this one. None of the boundaries of Christianity were breached, no transgressions against Leviticus this morning. Coffee instead of tea.
The first time I met my dad.
 The sun wouldn’t rise for another two hours. His bare feet made a soft swishing noise on hardwood, the pads of his feet barely clearing a shuffle. What little hair he has left stands straight out from his skull, and his cheeky grin is visible in the dimmest light I’ve already clicked on. Coffee he says, walk-shuffling over to the percolator already bubbling away. He gives me a hug, his Star Wars shirt and arms still warm from sleep.
 
I know how lonely it is to get up that early he says to me, days earlier
 
I get in the car and finish my prayers.

The more I travel, the more I’m convinced that the Midwest
is a blanket of architecture and well-curated front lawns that fell in a heap over the continental United States.
The colder the better.
The seeds of platitude sown into the earth, bearing
twinkling red and green and white fruit on this cold night in early November.
My uber driver is listening to NPR.
I feel like any moment, we’re going to pass my father’s high school
or arrive at his childhood home.
The home my grandfather built.
​The house now animated with new bodies.