Angels love to eat cheeseburgers in the bathtub, sometimes they calculate their taxes, write
       their thank you notes, jot ideas for ways in which they might embarrass you for truth’s
       sake. Angels write to God about how it feels to be stuck in a body, but God knows what it
       feels like. God starts many chapters like that: Imagine you’re the gift in the box waiting for
       the big reveal. Angels always close their letters by telling the big G what he is missing out
       on. If he could be affected by whiskey and Rock and Roll he might forget about the caroling
       of angels and his liberally oiled pearly gates. God, Las Vegas is just another temple to your
       name.

       Her gun’s tongue sounds like a swan when it calls out for adoration. It senses warmth like
       all things bomb-kissed. Love is better kept outside of the body, hot in the hands, sleeping at
       the ribs. I deserve it, she whispers to each bullet when she slides them in the cylinder. She
       is talking about slippery love. Cold rooms are shaped like barrels of grief. Blackbirds wait
       on the treetops looking down at cool blue. Torches and dares walk hand in hand. She was
       called the black widow. When she stands up, she feels like a shovel, metal plate and wood
       handle, splinters and clods of wet mud. If you’ve been buried and worked your way up
       through the earth, you have heard this little ditty. She says that the gun just wants to go
       home.