If you Don’t Believe in God What Do you Believe in? by Joy Gaines-Friedler

If you Don’t Believe in God What Do you Believe in?

I believe there are no intimacies we don’t cherish.
That I live in a kind of grace & a kind of fear
all the time. I believe in process, in playing to win—
but not needing to. In the cops that stop traffic
to cross the homeless, in the trains I don’t get on,
the buses I don’t take, bars I don’t drink in,
& buying newspapers with exact change.
I believe in change. I believe that music
becomes a house you occupy, especially
the long extended notes of a minor chord,
the way a good rest on the couch is a gift
that occupies your muscles & settles your bones.
I believe in waiting for the trees to bud
& leaf-out, & I believe in math, which I hate
because it gives me anxiety but its usefulness
is necessary to build things, even weapons,
& to calibrate destruction. I believe in solutions
found in microscopes & test tubes. But I also
believe in looking through the objective lens,
the eye-piece focus, the chance to witness
the mystical shapes of what can be found there.

*

Farmington Hills, Michigan poet, Joy Gaines-Friedler, is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. Author of five books of poetry, including Capture Theory, a Forward Review Indie Press, Book of The Year Finalist, she won the 2022 Friends of Poetry Chapbook Prize for Stone on Your Stone. Her work shares the pages of many great poets in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. As well as James Crews’ The Path to Kindness, and Gerry LaFemina’s Fantastic Imaginary Creatures: An Anthology of Prose Poems. Joy teaches poetry and memoir for non-profits in Michigan where she has worked with male-lifers in prison, asylum seekers through Freedom House Detroit, for InsideOut Literary Arts Project, & “Haven” for abused women. Her latest book Secular Audacity came out in 2025 from Mayapple Press.