When you start listening to God you listen first to silence.
You hear first what God is not and you hold it out--display it, rest it on the tip of your tongue, show yourself you are not alone. You lay on a rug that once covered a living sheep’s body and, touching the skin of its skin and your own skin, you listen to yourself listen.
You write something that seems like a poem but, because revelations are God, it is God that you write. Careful to avoid the image. Now old enough to have mostly outgrown similes, you write God's object directly.
And when you write God’s mind, God’s body, God’s transubstantiation, you also sit alone-- Apartment complex. Chlorine water drinking cats. Fuschia-pink flowers. Art supplies. Water machine. Swimming pool. Paid air-conditioning included. Your bike is stolen. You’ve come back and you’ll leave again. You are never more alien than God.
I read your lists as incantations. The boundaries between things undone, and remade, endless intervention. Pushing into what you wrote, I try listing things. I can’t get inside it, it’s too blazing and wonderful. But listing is pleasurable, what’s more it’s ontology. An image of God. Or a see-through glass to see through. A glass to press to a door and listen and a door to press into a water glass. Reflections here are like long lines of interconnected fuses--a lure toward what is BDSM, where the body opens where God is God and God opens where the body is. Tautology has the pleasure of reality where openness closes over everything.
God’s deadline
God’s online shopping bill
God’s unanswered phone calls
God makes colors and babies and God is a part of all pure sex. God doesn’t look away from the computer when my mom and I accidentally watch a woman in a stars-and-stripes thong give a blowjob in our living room on http://www.whitehouse.com. I’m twelve and God is also twelve. God is also forty-five and so is my mom.
God’s heating pads
God’s pharmacist
God’s iodized salt
God’s urinary incontinence pad
God’s grandparents’ luggage
God’s afterschool snack
God is there the night God stops talking to me. I sing myself to sleep, hymns in the navy-dark room. A closed door is a bright boundary.
God’s tiny ceramic salt shakers
God’s ant farm
God’s dead cat
God’s fundraiser chocolate bars
God’s fat little dog
God’s old fleece blankets
And it’s God who looks at me and tells me when my skirt is too short for church, and it’s God who sews my Halloween costume, and God who curls and then occasionally burns my hair. It's God who learned to knit.
God’s basement closet
God’s open bowl of chips
God’s shrimp dip
God’s Christmas ham
God’s artichoke
God’s conscription notice
God’s damaged bookend
God’s evacuation plan
It’s God who wants new countertops and it's God who tells my sister and I to never lie, and God who always finds out. It's God who sets out the bright blue mint toothpaste, and the tiny red fluoride pills. It’s God who opens the bathroom door when you are inside, hiding. It's God who makes all the cookie dough and God with a storage room full of banana chips and grape juice. It’s God who reads Gone with the Wind again. It's God who mails packages of candy you don’t like.
God’s graduate school application
God’s yoga injury
God’s institutional bias
Antibiotics belong to god
Friends belong to god
Illness belongs to god
God writes your breathing out when you are most intense in the city--he empties you into the present moment of a school, or a church, or a store.
God’s magic
God’s eco-dyed silk
God’s theme park beach
God’s pregnancy
God writes my memories into churches where someone stops at the erotic peak of my body and softly lets go, into churches with the same gold-clung poster, a white man’s body, and a dangling lavender garment, neatly trimmed brown beard. God writes it so there is repetition--that someone can see it, but also so that someone else cannot.
God’s beach towel
God’s anticipation-poem
God’s motion detector
How everything makes itself
My mother believed in reverence and fasted once a month, still, she kept a nearly opaque old ziplock with gum and caramels and mints. Each time she gave me one she would remind me that they were hers and I needed permission. Some things only God can.
God’s biopolitics
God’s bento box
God’s sense of smell
Candy and reverence and all the marbled paper in the hymn books belongs also to God. We are told again about the early saints, and how they crushed up all of their fine china and suspended it in the whitewash on the outside of the first temple--first of its kind, but all buildings and all bodies are also houses waiting expectantly for God--who can easily enter in.
God’s peppermint oil
God’s vegan gummy
God’s favorite marker
God’s outfit
God’s goat head patch
How God’s body belongs to God
And God was the husband--yours and mine, who made dinner, and cut vegetables evenly and fed the cat. God’s husband was glowing and also not a husband. For me God’s husband was a person rushing up the courthouse steps pulling his jeans up from behind, having not slept.
God’s grocery store
God’s favorite flavor
God’s pacifist manifesto
God’s girlfriend was drinking wine on the porch and waiting to lightly hold hands, and brush leaves off of legs covered in tights. God’s girlfriend was sentimental and nostalgic and disgusting and boring.
God’s quiet zone
God’s student
God’s electrolyte beverage aisle
It’s God who is screaming through the bathroom door. It’s God’s Lyft driver in the middle of the night looking for a coffee shop with you sitting in the back. It’s God’s wholesale bookseller with a basement filled with books. It’s God who touches your hair. It’s God who is already inside your mouth. It's God who is never going to come out. It’s God who loves the light moving and masturbates to the sound of water boiling.
God’s canned peas
God’s cornfield
God’s eyelashes
She tells me about buying raspberries at the store, “To me, all desire is sacred, no matter how commercial.” I agree silently through the phone.
God’s horse parasite
God’s history channel program
God’s chicken dinner
She belongs to God. When I touched her she bled. She told me she was a virgin; I knew she wasn’t and I nodded carefully through the shock. What is more sudden than the spirit. God caught in the moment. Something that happens all at once.
God’s emergency
God’s conversion chart
God’s copay
There are people that talk about the spirit all the time, pouring it out like hot milk over their heads when they sit blocked together, congregation. There is a placid movement between classes--flat time in the basement halls, white cold, or yellow. It never occurred to me to leave. Spruce bushes, amber and citrus, a dried smell and wide enough margins to hide behind with cement walls and a chain-link fence sprained and stretched with planar evergreens.
God’s recovery pillow
God’s prenatal gummy vitamins
God’s car trunk with escape hatch
God’s boyfriend searched for 3 hours on the street for someone’s grandmother's earring, and he found it, but God's boyfriend is mad. God’s boyfriend doesn’t like to waste his time and he doesn’t want to talk. God’s boyfriend believes in traps and doesn’t want to trip one.
God’s planned obsolescence
God’s repetition
God’s singularity
God’s evening light backyard
God’s loving memory
God’s distribution
God’s shedding grasses
God’s body-pain is trying to teach something. A group contemplation of bones in the back scraping, a shared inquiry into tender herniated lumps that make stomach wholeness stretch into screaming, slipping, testing. The twisted sinewed stretching of small elastics plinking rhythmically as bowels struggling to open rush and necks struggling to straighten snap with leaden dullness deep into each side of God’s head.
What is a priori is what humans learn through God’s body. Everything outside of our experience is inside of God’s. God’s body-picture is an image that holds itself up internally--a slump of hopeful aching and a tiredness that climbs stairs and wipes down surfaces and says, “you won’t touch the end of that yet.”
God’s limpid bile
God’s varicose veins
God’s heart attack sweat
God’s colorblind doctor
God’s happy gynecologist
God’s group home
I heard something about God when a boy refused to pee on your body, like language was God's under your tattoo, but the rest of the body escaped. And I think, you can’t mediate for everyone, prophets never do.
God’s bruised nipple
God’s broken hairbrush
God’s pair of clean underwear
After several years of shuttered sex, strange and clacking, I developed pain. God’s vagina. Both deep and surface, pain rubbed in, pined needled, exquisite and fainting. Broken with the oil of words, this is where I realize God is merciful because pain is an open-ended sensation.
God’s fifth drink
God’s horoscope
God’s open tab
God’s gold necklace
God’s father’s hands and fists
God’s birthday restaurant discount
God’s oedema
God’s eyesight
God’s decorative horse spur
God is crying in frustration. God sits on the floor. God’s focus is compromised. God comes home to God’s dog’s accidents on the floor. God walks to the store for unflavored Pedialyte. God can’t read God’s books. God doesn’t make God’s art. God cannot write poetry or prose, because God is too tired to think. God does God’s dishes. God does God’s laundry. God does God’s job. God gives God’s dog cookies. God feeds God’s cat. God takes God’s supplement and prescription pills. God follows God’s meal schedule. God rakes God’s backyard. God takes out God’s garbage. God does not help God’s neighbors.
God’s biological family’s cancers
God’s phrases
God’s writing-bath
God’s flatness
God’s dichroic mirror
God’s visual impairment
Everything is to scale for God. God is the same for themselves--a one to one, that holds also all of the numbers in between--folded infinities. God, like a sieve falling through a second sieve. To be the same as oneself and how to also disrupt it.
God’s grabbed wrist
God’s introduction to your body
God’s clarity has an order
God’s project
God’s panel show
God’s time for being alone
Where can we look for thinghood but to God? Each sentence, like each thing, is a separate object pearling on a long string--but how strange to separate any thing out. Watching soap bubbles close and glimmering briefly it shuts and pops at once. Language closes--but here, God reopens-- commandments are conditional statements, apophantic logic which only God can judge.
God's sunburn
God's oil lamp
God's snowshoes
God's cabbage salad
God's hearing aid
God's wet wipe
God’s blood blister
God’s time clock
God’s fish stew
God’s pink consent form
God’s stiffened biology
God’s circuit breaker
God signing with their hands
God wearing a summer scarf
God fruit-nippled and dew-laden
God’s mountain veil
God’s opened pomegranate
God forested
God salt-crusted
God glob-painted
God thick-haired
God baby toed and expectant
God’s dead chickens
God’s alive bacteria
God’s long table
Walking home under the half shade of leaves, their surfaces made and remade in the light, a low-cost movement of wind, translucent plushy filament-green light-bitten, blooming, clear, broken open, but shredded first into what is a texture to cause you to experience the air. This was stained glass and ocean-curtains when leaving school as a child, now as an adult leaving it again, I think how God(!) am I experiencing this again, something I could never remember.
God’s inner and outer beauty
God doesn’t need favorites where they live
stripped of power
God’s revelations don’t have to come to them. They don’t burst forth. They don’t have to be recontained. They don’t need to move at all. God is the same for God’s self. God contains the transcendental. God contains all change. God moves and God holds still. God does not need to be found. God is what is lost. God is what is gone. God is what is never complete. God is the tipping point.
God’s event horizon
God’s silent boyfriend
God’s gulf war
God’s bee colony
God’s frostbite
After God spoke, what was empty was full of emptiness and equally with words. We lay in the cemetery listening. Listening to a statue of Christ's hands and to a relief on a headstone of Christ in the Mediterranean--a tree dripping with dates. He did not look like you or like Christ or like God or like anyone. This was God’s headstone with a picture of God’s son whose skin was white and he was painted silent.
God’s country of origin
God’s second passport
Gods’ tenderness
God’s prophet
God’s book signing
God’s image as seen from a train
God’s asking about trauma
God’s Youtube lecture on idealism as metaphysics
God’s questions over the phone
God’s baleen neck muscles
God’s rabbit foot tongue
God’s closed esophagus
And God’s asking forgiveness