The Impenitent’s Prayer

Forgive us for sharing banned books,

Forgive us for stocking libraries with characters long excluded from yellowed tomes, girls who kiss girls under studded skies, crones and queers, survivors of fat and conversion camps,

Forgive us our herculean tales of finding joy in a world that would rather erase us,

Forgive us our pierced majoras, magenta carpets and drapes, and voluptuously pregnant men,

Forgive us our trypophobia and Takis, our selfies and Jibbitz, our butt plugs and fidget spinners,

Forgive us our unquestioning support of teens who wear kitty ears and lick clean their paws during math class, filling bento boxes with kibble and using litter boxes in school bathrooms where they cover their dung with, wait -

Forgive us for pointing out that your sources are garbage, for our disgust when we click the link to find an antisemitic screed in purple comic sans,

Forgive us our horror when we learn the weight loss supplements are sold by a Bible-thumping platinum blonde with nine children and a closet full of golly dolls,

Forgive us our emails with preferred pronouns, for cross-disciplinary consensus that the planet is flooding and burning,

Forgive us for turning jollies to jelly, for choosing rainbows over steeples, for insisting on consent,

Forgive us our eye roll when we hear about how better it was and how men were men and women were women and people did not suck off the teat and holidays were Christian and no one had to worry about guns that slaughter entire classrooms of children,

Forgive us our unionized strippers, our neuroatypicals and vegan hotdogs, our chosen families, our Zoom therapists and paper straws,

Forgive us for Cardi B. and men in Crocs,

Forgive us for pointing out over Thanksgiving dinner that when compared to the NFL, sadomasochistic sex involves less force and fewer injuries, but in the 1960s the court ruled football players were sane whereas masochists were not,

But most of all, forgive us that wild pulse of freedom when we witness your shame of us and no longer share it.