Second 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We’ve invited Tania Runyan to be our next commissioned poet, and she has written five previously unpublished poems to help us think through and celebrate Advent.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.

Also, we’re running a holiday book promotion for the month of December. If you become a paid subscriber now, we’ll send you a thank-you book.

by Tania Runyan

You can keep food down now—
more, in fact, than you ever thought 
possible. It melts into my body 

like manna on the tongue. 
A sudden flare of energy
propels you to the river at dusk,

where you wade in and tilt 
your face to the stars. You linger 
on that trembling one 

to the east. If only you knew! 
Water laps just inches 
from the translucent snail shells 

of my ears as you float, hair 
spreading out to catch
a billion gemstones of diatoms,

dinoflagellates. They, too, 
will be saved, I tell them. 
Their love is too much to bear. 

When you stand up, the fabric
clings. Look at that bump! Nah, 
you shrug. Probably too many raisins. 

It’s like you don’t believe 
I am here. I could swing a lantern 
in your rib cage, and you would miss 

the light. When you start to fall 
asleep tonight—hair damp, 
soul calm—I will flutter kick, 

and you’ll catch your breath. 
Joseph! you’ll whisper, 
kneeing him awake. I feel him!

He’ll squint, suspended out of time
for a moment, then turn over 
and mumble, Are you sure?

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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.