Milk Gospel (Holy Letdown)

Each morning, I rise and am baptized again—not in the icy shame of original sin, but in the radiant flood of my own body’s mercy.

My breasts, once censored in pew and pulpit, now overflow with something holier than dogma: nourishment, warmth, arrival.

This is not the sterile dunk of my first baptism, where a man in robes pressed me into borrowed water and called it salvation.

This is the gospel according to letdown, the liturgy of leak.

They said god was elsewhere—on high, beyond, masculine.

They pointed upward, taught me to kneel, taught me to hush, taught me to believe that my body was temptation at best, and an abomination at worst.

But I have seen halos on my nipples at dawn, felt the spirit descend not as dove, but as milk, and I know:

I am not the sinner.

I am the sacrament.

Call it heresy, call it blasphemy, call it postpartum.

I will not repent.

I am the chalice and the wine, the altar and the hymn, the preacher and the prayer.

And if heaven still waits above, let it weep with jealousy—

for I have found god between my ribs,

behind my sternum, and rising warm in the riverbed of my chest.