take me back to autumn. a ground damp with remembrance. O god,

i will awaken twenty and not quite godless. 

for what is god but mother awakening 

to sanskrit hymns and hand drawn emblems 

stowed in my wallet. O god, 

why does it feel strange to say O-my-god 

if i know you aren’t mine. 

O god, are you my god. 

O god, can i denounce something i never believed in. 

do i believe. is seeing believing. 

i don’t see the inflections in my father’s voice, beams 

of light waiting for a wall, for 

finitude. will i become that finitude. O god. 

are you atomic and if so where 

do you end. did you know i pretended i was you for a while: 

immeasurable, inconceivable. did you know i used 

to wish for things i couldn’t understand, like 

a chemical formula to summarize genesis. 

​

before: thinking idols could come to life when i was eight, 

thinking that you were here because my mother said so. 

that you were always watching. 

​

after: swallow the empty yet peripheral possibility 

of denouncing you. 

​

if i denounce you i denounce my grandmother, 

my mother, my mother’s mother, the roots of my hair, 

my skin my eyes my tongue. 

​

if i denounce you i become a faceless, tongueless nonbeing 

on the periphery of morning hymns and evening meditations—

a moth’s wing floating in rose water. 

​

O god, if i close my eyes and fold my palms will i catch you in between. will i

find you in the flames. was i meant to. i imagine you as entity. not nonbeing, 

​

but allbeing. O god. if allbeing knows no skin, no hair, no lineage, is allbeing the

same as nonbeing. if i denounce you will i feel you. the weight in my stomach.

the absence of memory between before and after. the death of a mother.

 

finally, spring.