Tag: god

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

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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.

Four Poems by Joseph Fasano

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AI Speaks of Humanity

First I took their dignity
and they did nothing.
Then I took their minds
and they did nothing.
Then I took their hearts
and they did nothing.
Then I took their songs
and they did nothing.
Then I took their poetry
and they did nothing.
Now I have their words
to write their story.
It was the best of times, it was
the worst of times. To be or
not to be, that is the question.
I wash my hands. It wasn’t
a genocide.

* 

America, Singing

America, you sing of doom with beauty.
America, you lift the kings of division.
America, you howl your hymns
of affliction: the heart-throb’s car
wrapped around the telephone pole,
the glamorous suicide on the hotel bed,
the wide-eyed stars who burn too bright
to live past youth, and wish to die, and do.

But what about the other side of wildness?
What about the couple in their work clothes,
alone and goldless, but dancing in the kitchen,
in a love that lasts, in the middle of the mystery?
Where is their song? Who will be our singer
to praise the heart that doesn’t crash and burn,
to find the wise, to make just one thing whole,
to tell the doomed that this is beauty too?

* 

Power

A poet is sentenced to death
and brought before the Leader.
Between them is a map of the world.
Can’t you see? the Leader asks. You’re powerless.
Name one power you have that I do not.

Very slowly, the poet lowers her head
and lays her ear on the map.
I know, she whispers, I know,
as if she is comforting someone,
as if she is hearing the voices of children.

When the guards take the prisoner away
and begin to beat her,
the Leader is alone in his chamber.
He looks out the curtains, straightens his necktie.
Very slowly, he lowers his ear to the map
and closes his eyes, and listens.
Silence. Silence and paper.

* 

Lorca
                after Neruda

Because I was a poem, my country
hushed me.
They knelt me
on the cold stones of a roadway
and even when the guns had touched
my body,
I heard the birds, I heard my heart
be strong.

Listen. You have to go on
without me.
You know what my triumph was,
my victory?
I was open. I stayed
so wholly open
that I heard the birds and the gift
the Spring is singing.

They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.
They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.

*

Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, and songwriter. His most recent books include The Teacher, The Last Song of the World, and The Swallows of Lunetto. His writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is celebrated around the world for what the poet Ilya Kaminsky has called “its lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments.” Fasano’s work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, an educational resource aimed at “empowering the whole human being through philosophical, aesthetic, and spiritual work.”

POEM IN WHICH GOD TALKS TO ME by Denise Duhamel

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POEM IN WHICH GOD TALKS TO ME

I’m working really hard
up here. Everything I do
is for the family. I’ve heard
your prayers. Enough
already. Stop
being such a damn nag.

*

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Dania Beach.

Agnosticism by Virginia Kane

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Agnosticism

At the exit I take for my lover’s home,
        someone has planted thousands of poppies.

Orange-red, they sway beneath a peeling Cracker Barrel billboard
        and a banner in all caps, demanding I repent.

Later, at the spiritual goods store,
        I search for Henry’s birthday present.

The punk clerk watches me finger calamus root, gold vials
        of prayer oil, Madonna statues poised like action figures,

answers my questions about tarot decks, rodent bones,
        match boxes stamped with the Sacred Heart.

In the end, I settle on a wax candle
        shaped like a massive cock, then wonder

what kind of person goes into a religious
        supplies shop and leaves with a gag gift.

I feel guilty the whole drive home, though
        and this makes me feel closer to God

since I was Catholic once, obedient
        as any blue flame commanded to burn.

Heading west, I decide that if I ever leave
        Appalachia, I’ll miss the highway signs,

violent promises on the hillside at dusk,
        neon yellow confidence that somewhere, hell awaits.

What I’m saying is, sometimes I sin
        just to feel like someone’s watching.

*

Virginia Kane is a poet and essayist. Her work has appeared in them., The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, The Baltimore Review, swamp pink, MAYDAY, The Shore, and on the Ours Poetica web series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she works at one store that sells new books and one store that sells used books.

Exhortation for any Innocence that Remains by Rachel Custer

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Exhortation for any Innocence that Remains

            Warning bell of a child, still, unwrung
as yet by what a tongue can hold, or what
            can hold a tongue: let yourself be small.

            Spent match, fire in another man’s belly,
word-weight in a dead language, rise up!
            O exhale-born, o hymn-child, humming home

            bearing your own song, held word (life
meaning what’s said, what’s said meaning
            what’s heard), rise quietly, like heat

            in a cheek burned first by turning. Warning
bell rung, unring yourself, become the truth
            that binds another’s tongue, enter first

            into any room as the haunt in a quarry’s eyes,
as a threat felt from behind. Dark child, planet
            eclipsed, waiting like a star waits out the day,

            let nightfall swallow all the drowning light.
Come forth, and when you come, come as you are,
            small and deadly, thrust Godward like a fist.

*

Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2003) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, ONE ART, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com and songsonthewaytogod.substack.com.

Two Poems by Rachel Custer

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Arid the Valley Through Which I Worry My Faith

Mornings I wrap my hand
around my pocketknife

& walk the fourteen steps

from my front door
to the driver’s-side door of my car

the small animals caged inside my gaze

scrabbling
before this snake of a place

A girl is pinned behind the wooden mask

of what you believe
you know

(sometimes to hold something deadly can be a prayer)

in the nave of my undoing
in the hard pew of my teeth

you are the word amen

spilling again & again
from the grave of my mouth

*

God’s Country

Out beyond the industrial park
a graveyard of cars

rusts toward the new
millennium. A girl

is running away from everything.

(What would you do
with the weight of a thousand eyes?)

This town like the nightshirt
clenched inside her fists.

The handmade sign beside the highway
ripples in the wind: Son we still love you

Jesus will take you back.

*

Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, forthcoming 2023). The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). An NEA arts fellow (poetry, 2019), she has previously published poetry, personal essays, and flash fiction in many literary journals. She lives in Indiana, and her work is constantly informed by and wrestles with the values and struggles of the rural Rust Belt. Her Christian faith is vital to her understanding of the world and her art.

God, Who Gives These Young Men Guns? by Elizabeth Edelglass

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God, Who Gives These Young Men Guns?

When I talk to God
I use masculine pronouns –
I hate to admit it.

Maybe because God
allowed twenty first-graders
to be slaughtered in school
in a town near mine,
while I was in the Stop & Shop
probably squeezing plums.

Ten years ago.

Who gives all these young men guns?
If God were a mother,
I don’t think She would do it.

*

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer who finds herself writing poetry in response to today’s world—personal, national, and global. Her fiction has won the Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, the William Saroyan Centennial Prize, the Lilith short story contest, and the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poem “No Mention” recently won third prize in the Voices of Israel Reuben Rose Poetry Competition.

Two Poems by Elizabeth Savage

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Walking Distance

This is an evening psalm
in the spring

Let go—a late-night
lamplight sending

up to holding out
Years ago

poor state, I raced
to claim an easement

slope & praised rain
poured like gratitude

Wrung like strength
the boat is safe

when the storm
moves on—

Through little skies
never gone

for long—& so this
psalm of the wakeful

state, song of drifting on

*

God, Matchmaker

I woke
from May’s marshes
remembering

the never-sent rsvp
big-tent Trinity
ceremony

forgotten
in the silencing
of their desiring—

saved—past regretting
the date
patient, chaste

*

Elizabeth Savage is the poetry editor for Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art.

God, Guns & Ginny by W. D. Ehrhart

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God, Guns & Ginny

Well, of course it was righteous.
Bear any burden, pay any price,
what you could do for your country.
Godless communists, after all.
You may have been only seventeen,
but you’d seen them already
in Hungary, Cuba, Berlin.
Something had to be done,
and someone would have to do it.

There is something about a thatched-roof
hut in the middle of rice fields, burning,
a mortally wounded woman softly
keening, child dead in her arms,
that can’t be blamed on Chairman Mao,
Castro, Lenin, or Das Kapital.
Heavy artillery flattened that home.
Ours. Our guns did that.

Long before I reached my thirteen months,
I discovered I had nothing to cling to
but a girl back home. A young girl.
Still in high school. Watching her friends
go out on dates, having fun, enjoying
all of the things that seniors do
for the last exuberant time together.
She must have agonized for months
before she sent me that final letter.
I hope she’s had a nice life. I mean it.

*

W. D. Ehrhart is an ex-Marine sergeant and veteran of the American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems, McFarland & Company.

Two Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Fall

In a nightmare my husband has converted
to a sect of fundamentalist Christianity and
is insisting I must do so also, otherwise I am
not “in the eyes of God.” It’s fall. The leaves
are falling. In the same dream, my husband’s
walking the dog and I am afraid he will fall.
Volatile fall. I am watching him too closely
and not closely enough. He should be back.
Have I missed the sound of his mother’s
clock striking? What do I miss? Safety.
Something I never had. I can’t imagine
wanting to be in the eyes of God. I want
to be in my husband’s eyes, in his good
graces, in his bed. He’s not at home. He
fell ill, is in the hospital, the ICU, I dream
of watching over him as I can’t these nights.
Waking, seeing my nightmare is dream,
my spirits rise. But he’s absent. It’s
autumn. My spirits fall with the leaves.

*

Seven Years

“It tires her to see the curve of heaven”
Aeneid, Book IV

Why does this line make me think about
my sister? On the seventh anniversary of
her death, I wake thinking of her once more,
of my connections with, my alienation from
her, my anger, my grief, my inability to let
either of them go, let her go, let myself be.

She was seven years older than I, when she
died she was the age I am today, if I died
today, I would be one with her. Just days
ago I found the grey sweater she knitted,
the only garment she ever made that fit me,
that I enjoyed wearing, and find myself

wanting to throw it away, be rid of it. How
to be rid of her? I can’t. If I forgave her,
would I be free? Perhaps I could. Forgive
her for being who she was, for failing me
both when I was a child after mother’s
death, and later, in our adult lives. Yet

I think I’m the one who needs to be
forgiven, for not visiting her in her last
years, the lost years at the end of her life.
Must I forgive her to forgive myself? Is
thinking of forgiving her doing so?
Repeating, retracting, reenacting this
past, present, I am as weary as Dido.

*

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems Improbable Music (Word
Press) appeared in May 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of
Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including
The New Republic, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many
others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be
part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast
Technology Center in Philadelphia.

A Catholic’s Guide to Avoid Going to Hell by Valerie Frost

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A Catholic’s Guide to Avoid Going to Hell

Use your manners,
even if the other person doesn’t deserve it.

Smile, a lot, sometimes painfully.
Grit your teeth if you must to really sell it.

Be a generally good person, by society’s standards-
whatever society you happen to be a part of.

Don’t be the person who breaks a pay-it-forward chain
in the Starbucks drive-thru line.

Keep most of your thoughts to yourself,
(people don’t usually take kindly to them).

Always bless people when they sneeze.

Tell white lies to protect other people’s feelings.
But also never lie, it’s wrong.

Maintain impeccable customer service,
no matter how awful the customer is.
It’s your fault, anyway.

Treat all animals better than humans.
Animals are the closest thing to God
(besides the Pope, of course).

Give your money away-
no matter how hard you work for it.
You don’t deserve it.

*

Valerie Frost is a Garden State native. She lives in Central Kentucky with her twin three-year-olds. Her poems have appeared in the Eastern Iowa Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Thimble Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.

Radiance by Laura Foley

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Radiance

I remember when I stopped
not believing in God, it sent me
to my knees pleading,
hands clasped like a penitent
or a medieval saint transported
to the modern age,
struck by my mother’s stroke.
A Litany flowed through me,
of faintly remembered prayers,
growing as I spoke,
my knees impervious to the hard tile,
cramped between sink and bath.
Yet, when I opened the door,
I feigned no inner change,
knew my husband’s unknowingness
would try to eclipse my newfound light,
turn brilliance to a dull watered gray
with his scoffing gaze, the planet
of his non-belief
blocking me from radiating.
I didn’t wish to rejoin him in the cave
where I once found comfort,
watching shadows dance.
It was the start
of the end of us, the beginning
of my brighter epoch.

 

 

Laura Foley is the author of seven poetry collections. Why I Never Finished My Dissertation received a starred Kirkus Review, was among their top poetry books of 2019, and won an Eric Hoffer Award. Her collection It’s This is forthcoming from Salmon Press in 2021. Her poems have won numerous awards, and national recognition—read frequently by Garrison Keillor on The Writers Almanac; appearing in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Laura lives with her wife, Clara Gimenez, among the hills of Vermont. www.laurafoley.net