god
By K. Iver
So we, being many, are one body in Christ,
and every one members one of another.
ROMANS 12:5
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,
and cast it from thee.
MATTHEW 5:30
At my beloved’s burial,
I can’t see his body.
Only carnations. I hear
your name and my beloved’s
in the same sentence.
I didn’t come to meet you
whose men are everywhere,
calling themselves your body
singing about their own
beautiful blood which I’ve never
seen but am willing to bet isn’t
as beautiful as my beloved’s
jacket, full of his skin cells
and waiting to reincarnate
from a Goodwill medium rack.
In the room of my beloved’s
body, no pictures. Only
carnations. They spill over
his box like misplaced grief.
Underneath them he dances
with strangers at a gay bar
two hours from town.
Unbuttons his uniform
in a desert barrack an ocean
from town. Leans on his red
Bronco smoking through relief
in the middle of town where
too many exes are watching
the club door. Lord,
in the room of my beloved’s
body, your men won’t admit
the fact of his body.
In the foyer, one room away,
a decade-old portrait of him
in pearls and a black dress,
his expression proof
your goodness doesn’t extend
where it counts, the stories
I hear about my beloved
as mistaken as your miracles.
Lord, when I loved you,
I didn’t know
so many of your men
would exile so many of us.
When I was ten, I wrote
volumes of letters addressed
Lord and warned classmates
about the rapture and called
televangelist hotlines for assurance
the devil’s lava wasn’t waiting
beneath sleep. Later,
my beloved took your side
in debates about your existence.
If he was right, you owe
him a confession. Tell him
how your body wouldn’t take
your advice, how its right hand
severed an entire demographic.
Look at him, in his new eyes. Say
what you can redeem, and won’t.