by Chris Gilpin

I was baptized under a basketball hoop. This explains everything.

Our church, when I was growing up, was buildingless. We made
and unmade our place of worship in a rented high school gym. It
was a shoestring set: no stained glass saints to bless us, no pipe organ
pumping our prayers heavenward, no pomp, no circumstance, just
people, sitting on metal chairs arranged in a circle, the curve of which
seemed like heresy against the crisscrossing court lines drawn on the
gym floor.

When I was introduced to God, he was wearing sweatpants. His son
was a Jewish Michael Jordan without a shoe deal.

Sunday school happened in the same classroom as weekday school, so
it’s no surprise I became a secular poet. I leave the cryptic mysticism to
others: I believe in details.

It was in a fluorescent-lit, standard-issue gymnasium when our minister
dabbed fountain water on my forehead and called it a blessing.

Chris Gilpin is a two-time member of the Vancouver Poetry slam team (2008 & 2009), the champion of Vancouver’s 2008 Haiku Death Match, and winner of the Vancouver’s 2009 CBC Poetry face-off. in the summer of 2006, he toured the Canadian fringe circuit with his play “87% true: the Lies that Bind,” co-created with Rosemary Rowe. His work has been published in Geist, Poetry is Dead, Vancouver Review, 42opus, and others. He also performs as part of the clown-rock supergroup Awesome Face.