to look upon angels

any manifestation of divinity in stories needs to be monstrous and alien and beyond the scope of the text to contain. So let's talk about how they are creatures of spirit, divine starlight that fits into the space between atoms and swallows worlds and both at once; how everything is here and everything is now and both are the terrible might of the Lord, because no angel can be an atheist, not even the Morningstar, for all the universe, every quark, vibrates to greatness of God and so do they, servants that they are.

(they have their father's wrath and their father's might, all right angles and the fury of a storm. They do not feel any more than a solar storm feels, and think in syllogisms and straight lines and swords)

let's talk about how they are meant to be the bridge between the terrible ungraspable god and the stumbling skinned things that are humanity, but even then, even then they have to bend and fracture themselves so as not to shatter eardrums, burn eyes white and unseeing. How they carry obliteration in the space between their wings, and the touch of them is holy fire. How they are more.

Let's talk about how, when they are asked to walk among men, they must be elided into physicality, and the silence and smallness of it is madness. The angels that came unto Abraham and Sarai had first screamed and rent their new flesh in an attempt to feel the divine again; the two who partook of Lot's hospitality spent the whole time shivering like coke addicts, and vomited at the thought of being profaned with human hands, human cocks.

Let's talk about how Raphael--the prince of Heaven, ruler of the East, called God-Who-Heals--appeared to Tobias and promptly dropped to his knees, every new atom of his stunted form screaming with the effort of keeping an archangel contained.

(You're not very good at this, kinsman, Tobias will say later in their journey. His hands are slick with scales and cold blood as he digs out the fish's liver, and Raphael must look away, gorge rising in his throat. This is not what I am, he tells the whelp-boy, whom God loves so. This is not what I am.)

and--AND--let's talk about how even then they wear their alien flesh too tightly and in the wrong ways; how their darting eyes are always bloodshot around too-dark irises, how the stillness of their expressions, of their hands unsettles. They do not understand instinct, or the easy vellications we inherit with our skin; all is conscious to them, all is intent. Their motor neurons fire in perfect harmonics.

Let's talk about how they cannot quite hide their otherness--the smell of ozone lingering in their skin, the stretch and strain of their too-predatory smiles. They put us in mind of toothed things waiting the darkness, and move strangely, sinuous, more snakelike than bipedal.

(they break the smaller laws of physics, just to give themselves room to stretch out their wings, trapped in breathing, bloodied, membranous cages, with bars of bones)

let's talk about how when they are finally released from a duty, they burst from their confines as stars in supernova, singing alleluias with their hundred mouths, fiery wings outspread. How they are monsters of purity forced into filth for the God they love; how they resent us for that.

(how they do not understand what their god can see, in our fetid inexact smallness)

Let's talk about how Gabriel appeared to Mary, and when she breathed, horrified, my body has been seized by the divine, he offered her no words of comfort.

He thought it a fair trade.