levelheaded: metousiosis

Ryan Boyd’s “metousiosis” is reminiscent of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” in the way that it draws parallels between the sacred and profane. In the poem’s first declarative sentence, our speaker lays out a belief system. The indirect article “a,” along with the lack of capitalization in the word “god,” leaves room for the possibility of polytheism, or at the very least, for the speaker’s own uncertainty surrounding the belief in one God that is fundamental to Christianity. Equally as important, this first sentence asserts that the narrator’s sense of reality stems from interaction with the physical world.

From these simple opening lines we also learn that, for the speaker, touch and taste validate existence. But more, touch and taste “consecrate”—that is, touch and taste make holy. The mystery of transubstantiation could be called a lot of things, but sexy probably isn’t one of the first words that comes to mind. Similarly, sex can be explained through a variety of fun, flirty metaphors, but Maxim and Glamour probably wouldn’t put “wafer turning into the body and blood of Christ” high on such a list.

This poem is weird. Weird is interesting. Interesting means we want to keep reading. Within the extended metaphor that juxtaposes the spiritual and physical, pleasant descriptors are met with words that connote violence (“immaculate and bruised”; “saintly eyelids clenched”; “sweetly raw”). The unsettling lines about children mouthing objects, as well as the parallels drawn between cannibals, lovers, and recipients of the Sacrament of Communion in the phrase “every chunk of skin” cause us to consider what distinguishes the profound from the vile, the holy from the grotesque. Boyd also reminds us of the role of language in all of this, in the power of words to shape our perspective as we consider how dissimilar things are surprisingly, wonderfully, horrifically similar.

– The Editors