San Benito
the black bird stripped off their feathers they issued the jubilee of plenary indulgence in eucharistic communion expressing effects of anxieties intercessed and intersexed the black bird stripped off their feathers and threw themselves into a thicket of thorns protected by presence of viper and crown a sacramental medal of uncertain origin the poison was offered the glass was broken they issued the jubilee of plenary indulgence the black bird stripped off their feathers
Copyright © 2018 by Chip Livingston. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 18, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘San Benito’ is part of a collage-portrait series exploring physical and spiritual elements attributed to various figures designated as saints. The black bird’s plural pronoun was a conscious attempt to recognize the holy traditions of our gender-variant, nonconforming, and two-spirit relatives, which kept coming up as I meditated on San Benito’s sacred medal.”
—Chip Livingston
Chip Livingston
Chip Livingston is a mixed-blood Creek poet and the author of several books, including Saints of the Republic (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) and Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (NYQ Books, 2012). He is also the editor of Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie (University of New Mexico Press, 2022).
A mentor in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Livingston lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.