Laodicea—Tania Runyan

Last month, we shared an interview with Tania Runyan. We are such fans of her poetry that we invited her to take over this Substack for the next two weeks. Tania has written several books of nonfiction and poetry, but we invited her to share a few poems from What Will Soon Take Place, a poetic journey through the book of Revelation. During this Stack Takeover, we’ll be sharing a few of our favorites, the poems based on the letters to the seven churches in Revelation.

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Laodicea

by Tania Runyan

Paul says your love has been poured
into my heart, which by heart
he means soul, which by soul
I mean belly.

But bile eddies there, 
the acid I've thrown
in the faces of my beloveds
always trickling back. 

You stand at the door and knock,
the quake before vomit.
Tightened throat, thudding ears.
Then the body's sudden liquefaction. 

If I open, ignite me. Burn me clean
or just freeze me into rest.
Or swallow me and spit me out
so I can stagger back to you.

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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.