I remember how you used to love the Clark Sisters. You just knew you were Karen. Hitting all the high notes, always tryna out sing me, out shine me, out Christian me. But when “Jesus is a Love Song” was re-released on Karen’s first solo album, something changed between us. Your copper colored cheeks would get so red. Your voice suddenly cracking under the lustfulness of it all. We were both on the precipice of womanhood in ‘97. Both bursting out our training bras, skin purging hormones that wielded more power over us than Christ himself at the time.

Although we were sworn rivals at Church-when I heard Karen sing about the voice of an angel ministering to her, I saw your face. Your mouth; full of braces, long eyelashes; hidden behind thick red glasses like the ones Sally Jessy Raphael wore all the time. Back then, I could never tell you how you affected me. How, when I kissed my boyfriend, I saw you. When I mustered up the courage to touch myself in the tub at night I thought about you. For me, it was always only you. Maybe that’s why I was so pressed to be a second soprano. Across the choir loft I could stare at you and make it seem like I was listening to the sermon intently. Really I was imagining what your mouth felt like; wondering if the braces would leave an aftertaste of nickels on my tongue.

Watching you stumble through that solo, all red and embarrassed made my love of you grow deeper. That’s why I had to stop you in the bathroom afterwards and ask if you truly understood the lyrics you were singing. I had to explain what it meant to have emotion stop up your vocal cords. How suppression only impedes your natural ability to hit the note. How you have to let it flow, ride it out. I didn’t realize that telling you this would unlock something in us both on that Sunday. That we would embrace hurriedly and end our year long rivalry. That you would kiss me back when my impulsive tongue pushed itself through the gates of your heavenly mouth.

In that moment I knew Jesus was real. Kissing you made me a believer. When the choir director opened the door, looking for us because the congregation wanted an encore, your mouth was too busy on mine. Our tongues tickling each other awkwardly, fingers grasping at barely-there breasts, nipples standing up like they were ready for the altar call. I recall the last day I stepped foot into our childhood church, seeing you sing “Jesus Is a Love Song” is what I’ll alway have to remember the way we both came into our queerness. How I came to know God’s love. How we came to our end.

Illustration by Lauralee Benjamin

That is until today. Right now I’m lying in a bath of roses, lavender, honey and milk. I imagine myself like Bathsheba cleaning myself in ritual, but unlike her, I do plan on seducing you. Again. After being banished from Greater Saints Ministry, me and my Mama found salvation elsewhere. She went to Ifa and became a child of Yemaya. I never had the stamina for African Traditional Religions, the dancing all night, the sacrificial works. It’s such a powerful and active practice. And while I do appreciate how pleasure and beauty are revered, sometimes I find myself missing the church. Missing the gospel hymns, the wafer like body of Christ, your lips. “Hurry up now Danielle. You not at home!” My mother interrupts my reminiscing and reminds me this bathtub and home are no longer mine.

I’m in town for the weekend specifically to see you, but my mother thinks it’s to play a show at Lucky’s on 9th St. My “Nasty Woman Revue” was last night and I sang lewd songs with a magnolia flower behind my ear thinking of you the entire time. The crowd was captivated with my take on classics like, “Anybody Here Want to Try My Cabbage,” “Wild Woman Don’t Have the Blues” and my grandmothers’ personal favorite “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl”. I was Shug Avery in Harpo’s Juke Joint resplendent in my feathers and boa. Lucky’s was a solid good time. When making my seasonal trips home, it quickly became my favorite queer hide away to see drag queens perform the best of Brittney, Barbara and Beyonce alongside lusty Gen Z nb slam poets. If someone would have told me our tiny town would one day have a place like this for me to come back to, well maybe I wouldn’t have left in the first place.

What happened between us on that lusty Sunday years ago, forced me out of that church and eventually out of town. You stayed though. You threw yourself prostrate on the floor of the altar and cried, asking for forgiveness, help with the demon of homosexuality that overtook you. I ran and literally never came back. I was out. I got to learn my sexuality while I was still a teenager, by the time I got to college I could see the closeted lesbians bursting at the seams from a mile a way. I was always so gracious in assisting their journey onto the righteous path of pussy eating. And now I can’t wait to eat yours.

I open my legs slightly at the thought. Run my pruning fingertip over my own labia and wonder what color your’s must be. Is it dark purple like mine? Or perhaps it’s closer to the red undertones of a peach, I hope it’s as juicy. I wonder if you’ve ever gotten further than me in the bathroom that Sunday, years ago. If you ever got to know the intensity of another woman’s vagina and all the ways it can be explored. I flick my fingers across my clit and imagine it’s your lips. “Joanna,” I moan. I whisper your name aloud, because I believe that orgasms are magic and I need to manifest a second chance to get you alone. This time we won’t be interrupted, I think as I rub harder. “This time we won’t be caught,” I say as pressure builds in the bottom of my stomach. My hips roll and toes contract. “This time we’ll finish what we started,” I exhale as I envision your face between my thighs, while I rain down on you, like the melodies from heaven that Kirk Franklin and the Family sang of in 1995.

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