First Trimester—Tania Runyan
We’ve invited Tania Runyan to be our next commissioned poet, and she has written five previously unpublished poems to help us think through and celebrate Advent. Tania has been creating poetry from the perspective of Jesus on her Substack, Poet Jesus. If you sign up, you’ll receive Tania’s (“holy ghostwritten”) quirky, funny, eloquent, and consistently wise take on Jesus poetically weighing in on topics like Gen-Z, the dentist, depression, the election, and what might happen if he actually did take the wheel. For these poems, we’ll hear from Jesus again—in utero.
by Tania Runyan
I’m a jellyfish of multiplying cells dangling from every jot and tittle of the world. You, pallid mother, slouch against the wall with your head on your knees, your body warring with a fig–sized enemy. You shudder at even the mention of the sea: putrid wind, undulating murk and fin. A whiff of Dad’s carp sends you retching. Other times, you nod off, suddenly snoring in the middle of sorting lentils or scrubbing a tunic against the rocks. Cousin John leapt in the womb when he met me. To you, it seems I’ve already worn out my welcome. I’m sorry to do this to you, Mother, sorry to all women everywhere. It’s part of my design, this sickness, a stay against overwork and pumping poisons to the heart. Verily, you won’t feel like death forever. Blessed are you among women, right? Right?
Tania Runyan is an NEA fellow and author of the poetry collections What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her first book-length creative nonfiction title, Making Peace With Paradise: An Autobiography of a California Girl, was released in 2022. Tania’s instructional guides, How to Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, and How to Write a Form Poem, are used in classrooms across the country, and her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, and the Paraclete anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. She lives with her family in Illinois, where she works in educational publishing.