Thyatira—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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Thyatira

by Tania Runyan

When you travel on business,
your spirit must take leave.
 
Suspended in the clouds 
over Tokyo, you touch 

the phone pic of your children 
then wipe them away

like words on a whiteboard. 
Your body does its job:

neon cocktails, hands under hems 
in hostess bars. 

You rip into a $250 steak
like it's a Little League hot dog, 

trade jabs with your boss. 
But still, projections look bleak. 

Three years till the first starts college,
and you've amassed nothing 

but the pulsing in your head, 
hungover in the boardroom 

as the morning star rises.
Your wife meets the bus after school

an ocean away, and—God forgive you—
as her face rises in your memory
 
you shove it back down, bind it
in layers of silk.

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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.