Rapture Dream

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Elea Lee

In the dream I am younger, foolish, or maybe just in an alternate timeline. I am in college and for the first few weeks of the semester I keep missing a class because of some sort of social group attached to another class.

The repeated absences from the business economics class worry me, weigh on my mind, but I am actively choosing the warm, group project participation over a class I have registered for but have never attended. The idea of contacting the professor never enters my mind.

Finally, I decide I must go.

As I walk to the neglected business economics course, I see the group games people wrapping up a session. They are energized and talking to each other while I trudge off to face the uncomfortable unknown.

As I walk, I worry. Will I be able to catch up? What assignments have they completed? Will the professor have noticed I am missing? My concerns fill my mind.

Just outside the room, I can hear the professor tell the class to get out their graphing calculators—there is a test today!

I feel totally unprepared. No graphing calculator, I rifle through a bin to find scratch paper for a test as my heart sinks.

I walk into the room and approach the professor, who seems to know who I am despite my habitual truancy. I begin to try to explain myself—

“Hello, I am registered for this class…”

He cuts me off, sternly—

“Not as of today you are not.”

I am flooded with relief, but still worried. Do I need to confirm with the registrar that I have been dropped from the course? Will there be an academic penalty? Why have I paid for a course I did not attend?

Walking back, puzzling over the purloined business economics class, I see my fellow students engaging in a group activity.

They are arranging packaged snacks like sticky buns, coffee cakes, and Twinkies on folding tables so that an unseen cohort can sample them.

The contrast is stark. A minority group of students is facing a rigorous test, while most appear to be setting out and sampling junk food.

My last thought before the dream is over—

This is college? How strange.

Washed Ashore

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Elea Lee

I have to have written about this before—

I once knew a young, smart-but-also-foolish lifeguard

Who strove to find meaning in a fortune cookie when he had

A relentless friend who constantly tried to get him to

Fall in love with Jesus.

I have been puzzling about how to tell the story of God made into a baby made into a man made into a sacrifice for the sins of the world broken for us, breaking open hell, coming back to life, giving us our lives back.

There.

Here—

Is the bottle, washed ashore for you

Open it

And once you know it is true, put it in another bottle and

Send it out to sea.

Mixtape to Mars and the freckles in our eyes

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Elea Lee

I have long held the opinion that if a disheveled, crazed woman accosted you in the grocery store parking lot with a lottery ticket, you would probably still check the nightly numbers for a winner

I could be wrong but

Jesus is coming back soon and we don’t have

Time for trips to hostile planets or other vainglorious pursuits when it is enough to ask

What is on the mixtape Jesus has handed us

In the parking lot of this planet

Seconds before the end of

All remaining

“pretty girl discounts”

Clothed in Light

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Elea Lee

The rain came down all day, in a dry and thirsty place

The rivers and gullies rose, brooked banks, flowed, opaque with runoff, to the sea

The little girl felt the weight of it all, no running across the bridge, no looking for turtles and treasury things

The kitchen dance party helped, and the toasted sandwiches

Thank you, God, for the gentle rain, the dappled night, and Dollar Tree ponchos

Which make us all shimmer like apparitions as we walk the dogs through, dark, light, shadow, puddles you can kick up into arcs with your bread roll clogs

Puddles so deep and wide a girl can see her own reflection in them

Reflection of Him (who made the water, who calls the rain)

Who calls us all to shine like this all the time

In the wedding clothes of Light

(Revelation 22

Central Texas)

Ascent

Posted on April 18, 2026 by Elea Lee

Who questions the story? The strange-god-man beast? His labyrinthine abode? His carnivorous diet? The architect of his incarceration? The boy prisoner?

The last flight

wax and feathers, frenzied, ersatz wings

We all know this is not going to fly

But we proceed nonetheless

Watch them go in your mind, at least, father and son soar in the cloudless

sky where

All literary imagination and polytheistic scaffolding cannot stop the

Firmament from becoming thin and cold a million miles from the sun

Not hot at all, wings useless but intact

The boy would have died eventually, no doubt, but not from any hubristic ascent

No rather, the same things that tie us all to the ground

Aged and infirm

Dragging beautiful, insufficient wings across a sandy shore

This is the labyrinth

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Elea Lee

First, there is a forgotten Grace—tie this end to the fastening nail, hold onto the string no matter what!—

lights along the highway, who else is up at this hour?

-unspooling like a fishing line—

Saviors, truckers, a rogue paper man, and someone buying ice

-who knows how long the journey-

Love songs and lighted windows

Make a map out of insomnia and vigilance

Lost phones and lost loves

Welcome to the labyrinth/ hold tight to the scarlet cord

Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God

Dissolved into Light

She says

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Elea Lee

“That was too short!“

I tell her that it would have been longer if

She had been quiet faster

Will you write another one if I am quiet? She asks

Hard to, nay impossible to,

Say no

Beautiful mockingbird

Origami daughters

Their hair ribbons of color and light like their mothers

Were-are-will be

“nothing shall be impossible”

Wind! Birds! Mockingbird! Mother!

He is

The wind that shakes the trees, lifts the wings

Heals the world

(John chapter 3–all of it!)

Pareidolia

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Elea Lee

Within days of the end of an era I lay beneath a cloudy night sky and drew faces from slow moving clouds and stars and planets

I resisted the urge to cup your face in my hand or bang the flats of my palms against the heavy plate glass of the cathedral

Yell your name

But I had to

Had to

Touch the hem of your garment

Pray you turn and say my name

The Frog King

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Elea Lee

He would be

A lovely boy who lived

Close to the frog pond

The tadpoles would catch glimpses

Of him through the refractory waters

Walking to and fro in the cool of the day

But could they trust their love? How could they ever measure up?

How many froglings does it take to amalgamate

A suitable consort for a King?

All of them with all their hearts

Eyes fixed skyward

To see his face and speak at last in the tongues of

Men and angels

How to want…to be His friend

Posted on April 3, 2026 by Elea Lee

You have to see past the blood—your own and his

The stinging sweat and the jeering crowds

The voice in your own pounding brain

Nay, voices—

Saying that no king of anything could die like this

Alone and vulnerable in the dumpster fire of all

You have to focus on his eyes

What he sees and what is reflected in them

Love beyond measure/sky without end

And you must listen to his voice

Agony is too small a word for what he has done for us

The fire of the wrath of a holy God

Substitutionary Everything

Nothing left without Him.

Carrying Light

Words for light

Category Archives: Poetry