The Gospel of Disobedience

By Mark Dimaisip

Camcas Cervantes, Tadyak (Kick), 2018. Acrylic on wood, 48 x 48 inches.
Image description: A grotesque fantastical creature with yellow, green, and blue limbs and tails forms a pinwheel shape agains an indigo sky filled with stars and dark tendrils. 

Your Son in Shadow

Dear Father,

Forgive me, 

for I have not sinned— or so I keep telling myself.

It has been seven years since my last confession,

and even then, I lied.

I said I took the Lord’s name in vain,

but I didn’t mention whose name I whispered

like a rosary bead between my lips in the dark.

Not Jesus. Not Mary. Not Joseph.

But his. Always his.

I looked at him once,

and the air behind my eyes turned ash.

I feared I’d be Lot’s wife, frozen mid-turn,

salted for wanting.

You said the body is a temple,

What if mine was built crooked?

What if incense sours when it touches my skin?

The bush never burned for me. Or if it did, it did so quiet—

flames licking ribs,

no voice calling my name.

Sometimes a man pats me on the back and I freeze like a statue

of St. Bartholomew—stripped, silent, carved in suffering.

Sometimes someone brushes my arm on the jeep

and I feel my chest collapse like a prayer said wrong.

Sometimes my friend touches my hair, and I smile too wide,

so they do not see the trembling.

Father,

I cannot take communion.

The host curls on my tongue like guilt.

I think of what I wanted the night before,

how his name almost slipped out like a psalm.

I fast. I keep vigil. I offer novenas I cannot finish.

But no miracle arrives.

I scrub the softness from my voice, curve from my spine,

music from my fingers. Tried to be baptismal water—

clear, obedient, forgetting shape. But still I take the form of longing.

As a child, I wanted holiness. Now I only want to be held

without guilt gripping my wrist.

Tell me, Father, is it a sin to ache in silence?

I know how to kneel, how to bow.

how to swallow every word of truth.

I do not know how to love without writing a eulogy after.

If you ask me, I will say:

No, Father, I have not touched anyone.

No, Father, no one has touched me.

But you will see it in my eyes—

the grief of Lazarus raised only to hide again.

Some days, I think I’m Cain— marked not for murder,

but for desire I was taught to bury alive.

Other days, I circle the tree—

Not Eden’s joy, but the forbidden one,

still biting from the fruit, still blaming myself

for the sweetness.

Forgive me,

for I have loved in secret,

and called it survival.

In the name of the Father,

and of the Son,

and of the mouth I cannot kiss—

Amen.

Yours in silence,

Your son in shadow.

Camcas Cervantes, Talukbong (Veil), 2018. Acrylic on wood, 48 x 48 inches.
Image description: Against a dark sky and ground stands a golden shrouded figure punctuated by a hirsute vaginal opening with a tiny moth or butterfly in its maw. Peeking from under the shroud are animal tails, claws, and webbed feet in orange, blue, green, and yellow, dotted by colorful bitmapped squares.

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from Stations of the Closet

IV. The Beating

Laughter struck us like thunder made flesh.

Bruises bloomed into secret prayers.

We folded our ribs into paper cranes,

named them after forgotten saints.

Even pain, when folded enough, learns to fly.

[…]

VI. The Passing

We stitched ourselves from borrowed gestures.

Half-boy. Half-shadow. All surviving.

Voices borrowed. Smiles forged in the darkroom.

We moved through the world translucent,

a rumor wearing human form.

VII. The Fall

When we finally fell, we fell upward

as if gravity desired us differently.

Our sin wore sequins. Our shame said amen.

In another man’s arms, even damnation

smelled faintly of incense and sampaguita.

[…]

XIII. The Burial

We buried the boy who said sorry too much.

His ghost still folds our laundry at dusk.

The soil smelled of perfume and prayer.

Butterflies swirled around his grave

as the purple sunset posed for the cameras.

Camcas Cervantes, Tanggal (Remove), 2018. Acrylic on wood, 48 x 48 inches.
Image description: Against a deep purple ground floats a green orb, shaded blue on its left side, sprouting a white cottontail, bear-like feet, and two golden tendrils each dangling a red fruit on either side.

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The Gospel of Disobedience

Praise to the ignored, who split open the sky just to be seen,

for the firmament shall wear their fractures like jewels.

Praise to the children who dreamed themselves out of gender,

for they shall wake in bodies of lightning, uncontainable and new.

Praise to the lovers who kissed through static and static and storm,

for the cosmos shall echo their mouths in radio waves of mercy.

Praise to the abandoned, who walked the earth unnamed,

for the comets shall take their syllables and write them in orbit.

Praise to the boys who swallowed their shame like a small planet,

for gravity shall one day release them, weightless and radiant.

Praise to the girls who were told they were sin’s invention,

for their shadows shall invent new suns that refuse to set.

Praise to the disturbed, who wept into oceans that did not know their face,

for the tides shall carry their tears into the mouths of galaxies.

Praise to the anarchist, who loved too fiercely for language,

for they shall speak in auroras, in the syntax of the impossible.

Praise to the bodies that broke under sermon and science,

for their ruins shall birth new laws of light.

Praise to the ghosts who refused to rest until their names are remembered,

for they shall rise as constellations, forever teaching the dark how to glitter.

Praise to the souls who are still learning to call themselves holy,

for the universe shall lean close, and call them by their truest sound.

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Mark Dimaisip is a Filipino writer from Manila whose works have appeared in The Brasilia Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Human Parts, The Philippine Star, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Radon Journal, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His poems were placed at Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (2021) and shortlisted for Rattle Chapbook Prize (2022) and Bridport Prize for Poetry (2025).

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Camcas Cervantes (https://www.instagram.com/art.cmvr) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, licensed landscape architect, consulting creative director, and film production designer. Her works spanning varous media including acrylic, ink, digital painting, spray paint, and photo manipulation, have been exhibited internationally. She has participated in live art and public mural spaces, notably as a finalist in Pineapple Lab's Art Battle Manila, Art in Island's mural competition, and as a featured mural artist in FringeMNL's Makati Makisalo Festival. The series “Modern Ouroboros” reimagines packaging waste (plastic bags, boxes, paper bags) as creatures with gaping mouths trapped in an endless cycle of consumption. Inspired by Francis Bacon’s grotesque forms in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, these works reflect our own cross to bear, where what we consume ultimately consumes us.

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