Late last night I finally met God, who I’ve been asking for all this time with a voice that trembles like the frothy white water of an upset stream, or the timid shaking of leaves in the mid-autumn. Like you might expect my God resembles a spider. Many-armed and many-eyed to have a claw in everything and a strangle-view on the globe. I cupped my two hands to his face of many worlds and I touched my forehead to his and my lips hovered right above the eye with a red pupil, brushing against his lashes and his lid as it closed, and I whispered onto his skin that my marrow had gone rotten and needed to be scraped from me with a tuning fork so my whole body would ring as I was purged. 

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Here is the deepest and most profound truth of my flesh: that all of my problems are born from me, and that the grip of my slender fingers will burn to ash whatever they may touch. My corrosive effect is a foreign object. I am certainly corrupt, and drive away all good that I can see, but in no possible way could it result from my fertile gardener’s blood or the mushroom-sprout of seedlings in my veins. Some alien force has burrowed into my bones, God, and I need you to twist it from me as you would the murky water from a torn rag: for God is a tired old woman hunched over the floor that she cleans, and for God is the janitor in the local mall, and for God is some ancient ancestor of mine as they wipe back the sweat from their brow.

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I was not wearing a shirt. I had stepped out of the shower to see him there, breathing so hard and fast I could feel my ribs through the thin flesh of my sides. His hands came to caress my torso. The light touch of a pianist against calcium under a layer of paper. His face still within my grasp, eyes that, now close, seemed to sharpen and clear. A thousand letters in a single pupil. A thousand letters as the goose bumps rose on my flesh and my ribcage he turned to a keyboard. Parasite Blues in D minor. Here is the deepest and most profound performance of a God:

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How the skin he can mold into concrete. How the veins he can shape into lye. I can watch myself flatten and stiffen. There is alchemy now in his eye. In a year I was wearing a red dress. In a day there was velvet and blue. I could see how the threads came together, in the future I wouldn’t go through. And I asked him to free my misconduct. And I asked him to turn me to dust. Like an insect his feelers laced through me. All those junctions and cells to disrupt. There was tar that he pulled from my innards. There were systems of nerves like a seed. As my bones he then stretched into segments. I am collagen, spine, centipede.