CONTENT NOTE: This piece discusses grief, death, religion, and gender identity and transition.

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Charlie Pecorella | Issue 11, Summer 2026

For a year, he brought me to mass at St. Matt’s.
My father would pull to the curb, then melt
in heated seats til I came out clean, punched,

after submitting my punch card to the priest.
Murder of fish crows outside, body of
Christ flat on my tongue.

The priest was a surveillance monitoring
a droop of eighth graders, I among them,
dragged by the hairs to the pews, then

abandoned. Pews tough, buffed
as a bruised peach pit. I always left sore.

When Father Jorge’s speech slurred–
he called that speaking in tongues.
When he trailed off–it was a metaphor
for the shepherd’s Tevas-worn trail.

I was taut. I was taught how to kneel.

I was told to run
my tongue over the Book of Lamentations
that same year, when my father died.

It was an accident. An accident,
how he died: quick, permanent as bic blue ink
on a light leather seat. Stroke of bad luck.

My father loved to swap family member’s faces
on photo editing apps–quick swipe to swap
my brother’s head on my mother.

Maybe that’s what he was up to,
every Sunday ditching mass to mess with
the natural state of things, while my knees
ditched the kneeling cushions.

Like a god, he was swapping heads,
like I’d swap genders
my senior year of college. I’d swipe

the circumference of my belly button
with an alcohol swab, instructed
to inject counterclockwise.

Then panic, order tubes of matte black
lipstick and red-haired wigs.

I want to say that my father sat beside me.
That he resigned himself to laity
with a lavender sigh, took pleasure
in the mass-book sheath, found psalms

hand-painted on birth-pink petals,
that he blushed just to touch. That
he held me in one palm as a baby.

That “homiletics” is defined as
“the study of homosexual diction.”
(That I take pleasure in anything.)
That my father was too ashamed

to tap holy water on his pressure points–
his engorged temples, pulsating green
as a nitrogen polluted lake–instead he snuck

into the church basement as I scuffed
to the altar for communion,
he to sip from a falter, a fountain,
near the bathroom, a weak yellow stream

on which he tasted the dust
he would soon return to.

On the Sunday he had a stroke
we skipped mass, went to the diner.

He ordered eggplant parmesan.
I ordered scrambled eggs, potatoes
well-done and a side of white toast.

I want to say a lot of things: that he loved me,
that the crumpled receipts on the floor
of his Audi proved it.

But I’m a bad liar
with terrible memory.

I have a very difficult time
telling the Truth.