*Content warning for racism and misogyny and implied sexual violence*

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“[call] Well who's that writin'? 

[response] John the Revelator” — Blind Willie Johnson

Latrant, a man from the north, knew that fear makes men cruel. And that beauty and cruelty, valves both arterial and veinic, vie at the ventricular core of the world.

And though he was lean as a wolverine starved and shaped by austerity and weathered like a twisted tamarack lone upon a tundra, and though he had b...