All my friends have their gods & their heavens
& their plans on how to get there. They forfeit sex
for Lent, pork for life, they light incense, they light
candles, they offer fruit to the dead.
Is this the right time to confess that once I bit a boy
for calling me a Buddhist? Never mind I was six
& did not know what Buddhist meant,
never mind we were inside a Buddhist temple.
For so long, I thought god was played by a rotating cast
of my dead. For so long, god was a boy with a ring of keys
on his belt loop. I never had as much faith as I did then,
but I never talked to god as much as I do now—now
that my want is just the want of birds. At some point,
someone invited me to Easter, then to Seder, then to Eid
& for a night I talked to Andrew’s god, & for a night I
talked to Sam’s god. I talked to Saf’s god. I was a wick lit
by any god that wandered by—an appetite primed
for the miracles of others. & then Paul got sick
& then got better, & I said thank you thank you.
Paul & I are from a city first named after a bootlegger
& then renamed after a saint & when he died,
I caught a flight to a city only he knew, where the humidity
flattened the pleats I’d ironed into my pants.
All my life, I’ve bibled my humiliations, made saints of boys
in bad lighting, never considered heaven, only good weather.
But since all my dead have been called home by different gods,
I know they’re not, like I imagined, all waiting in the same place
for me. For so long, I thought I could get through by throwing
my faith in the general direction of any pulpit.
Thank you friends for showing me your gods,
& thank you gods for showing me my friends,
but the heaven I choose is a heaven I can leave.

This is drawn from “Staying Still.”