John Emil Vincent
From your lips to Christ’s ears
Like the Feast of the Circumcision, the Feast of the Ass occasions
the election of a Boy Bishop. The less you understand the better
you listen is the undergirding principle.
No one is being taught anything through these rites, not even the
performance of the rituals themselves, since there is no script and
there isn’t even a rudimentary plot or a theme, barely a beginning
and end; rather, worshippers are being confused out of ignorance
and into an ambitious minimalism.
You do them to do them. And the Boy, who is in this case Bishop,
smiles,
he loves not listening.
John Emil Vincent is the author of Excitement Tax (DC Books, 2018), short-listed for the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize, and Ganymede’s Dog, forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press in fall 2019. He has published several books of criticism and is a trained archivist. Vincent lives in Montreal and teaches at Concordia University.
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