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I am in a coffee shop where young Christians
tend to gather to talk about God
like wildebeests at a watering hole,
and even with their Bibles in hand,
they still sound so thirsty.

When I was a little girl in Sunday School,
the teacher gave me a white piece of paper, a four-pack of crayons,
and told me to draw how I imagined God.
I’ve been working on that picture for twenty years.

Today I imagine if God were here
at this table
he’d want to talk about coffee.
I imagine him sneezing and me left speechless
—what are you supposed to say, God bless you? That’s presumptuous
And laughing. I imagine God holds his chest as he laughs,
like Santa Claus.

I don’t mind imagining God a man
because I imagine he’d be fine
with the box of tampons under the sink
and my tears. Each drop the same salty consistency I’ve cried
since the tears of my birth.
Since I was twelve and everyone in my class hated me.
Since heartbreaks and deaths.
Since I started crying for no reason at all
except that it would feel good to stop.

I imagine he’d understand how
we can have so much to be sorry for
without being able to say I’m sorry.
He’d know that saying it never changes anything.
and it only comes as an afterthought.

And he’d have mercy on the dirty dishes
stacked up in my sink.

I imagine God on a motorcycle
riding down the freeway in the HOV lane.
As he rides past I can see
on the back of his leather jacket is a patch that says
“You’ll die too.” True.
Especially the way the white lines weight my eyelids
behind the wheel a four-wheel drive and a false sense of security.
“What is it you’re really afraid of?”
He’d ask me when I caught up to him
at the next rest stop, drinking the free coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
I imagine God would go bungee jumping with me.
I imagine his favorite food is funnel cakes.

I imagine God sitting here with me.
I ask him: “How many people in the world are crying right now?
This very second?”
“Such a predictable question,” he says, smiling.
“Here, let’s do this one instead,” he says. “Ask me
how many people all around the world are
at this second
picking their noses.”
And he laughs.

The unlimited family plan

There is poetry for people like me
who hate talking on phones
because on occasion
it will happen that
I find myself having to call someone
long distance to bitch because

I’m in a cute dress that unzips in the back
and now I’m fucking stuck
because
I don’t have a boyfriend to unzip me
and I didn’t think of that
when I put it on

just to hear my sister
on the other end of the line say
“I know how you feel” and that
the dress isn’t worth it
so rip the goddam thing off
you can go buy another

Hometown

You go out to the bar with one of your best friends, whom you haven't seen in a year. "Two vodka crans please."

"What kind of vodka? We have Monarch or Absolute. I'd recommend the Absolute Red. It's like...low cal." Really? Did she really just say that? Because I wasn't making a point to keep track, and I KNOW I don't need to.

"Yeah, that sounds fine."

"Here you are."

"How much?"

"Um...(counts silently, moving her lips) seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Eleven dollars."

God I love this town.

Excerpt

"What in the end does even the most fervent kiss mean, in which body and soul seem to mingle? What in the end does it mean that we traveled for months through strange countries together? What does it mean that I had a child with you? What does it mean that you cried in my lap over your affair? What does all that mean, since you still have left me alone...alone even in the moment when my body drank in the seed of life, which I carried in me for nine months, and which was destined, as our child, to live with strangers, and did not wish to remain in this world."

-from A Road into the Open by Alfred Schnitzler.

(beautiful passage...beautiful book)

*teehee*

I've adopted a new life philosophy:

Be nice to me and I won't eff you up. We'll see how it goes. I'm feeling optimistic about my new approach.

A toast: because you deserve the best *clink*

There are the men I've loved
and there are the men who have loved me.
I wish I could introduce them to one another
I wish they'd meet somewhere in the middle.
and maybe bring me flowers--but maybe that's getting too greedy.
I guess I can pick the flowers myself.

To have your cake and eat it too--
sometimes you must bake it from a box yourself.
If you forget to add the eggs
don't be too hard on yourself.
getting right 2 out of the 3
ingredients required
are good odds

The CIA should hire poets for spies.

we're much more keen and stealth. After all, who ever recognizes a poet walking down the street?

Also, it'd be much less of a mess to clean up. People would have read the memos more closely so as to dissect all those complicated metaphors. Then we wouldn't have this whole water boarding scandal to deal with.

<3 <3 <3

The couple behind me has split up the newspaper into two parts. That way they can both skim for the important stuff. When one of them comes across something of interest, they read it out loud to the other. People in love must be more in touch with the world around them, and all its goings-ons. They don't know I'm listening in, too, so that I can keep writing my paper and get the latest news at the same time.