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We’ve invited Tania Runyan to be our next commissioned poet, and she has written five previously unpublished poems to help us think through and celebrate Advent.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

Neither of us can barely move
these days, but still
you shuffle to the market

where women scowl at you
from behind their stacks
of gourds. It doesn’t help

that I’m not technically
his, but as I’ll proclaim
from a mountain one day,

blessed are the misunderstood.
You don’t have to explain
yourself. It’s enough

that you’re dying to rub
your swollen ankles
and can only reach your shins.

As for me, I pass the time
quoting Isaiah in the dark.
Wonderful. Counselor. 

Prince of Peace. Pierced 
for their transgressions.
Crushed.

One minute, I can barely wait 
to unfurl into the melee
of lepers and Pharisees,

the next, I want to shrink
into your glittering zygote again.
What will it feel like 

to be pierced? If I can barely 
imagine  the idea, Ama, 
how will you survive?

No. No. Tomorrow must worry
about itself. I will tuck myself 
lower into your pelvis now, 

prepare myself to push 
my face a little closer
to the uneasy light.

---

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.