If you ask for a god,
I will give you a hum-
drum sculpture, a cheap
vessel to fill
with what you think
is worthy: your angst
and cum, that one memory
of your mother
when she was still alive
enough to groan.
Give me your earrings,
your teeth, your gleaming
apples. Hope cannot be
cast without bric a brac.
You cannot believe
in a god you cannot touch
or ride. In the desert,
your life is exposed
as a ransacked teepee.
What belonged to you
belongs to the sky.
Even if your husband
is on a mountain, mounting
an ass that does not answer
to wife, there is a god
who wears his face.
I can bring you the god
of your dreams—blue-eyed
heifer, a cock and bull
story about how he is nothing
without you. When he comes
he will unzip your skin
from behind, climb inside.
At once you will multiply,
a perfect recursive algorithm
that turns your emptiness
into nesting
and infinite worlds.
Meghan Privitello’s first book, A New Language for Falling out of Love, will be published with YesYes Books in September 2014. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, Pinwheel, Sixth Finch, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her second manuscript, One God at a Time.
