PROSE POETRY
D LARISSA PETERS
GOD AND ALL THE THINGS
God was—to my 8-year-old mind—Michelangelo’s figure pointing—not reaching—down at man: muscular, white beard, flowing stern kindness, somewhat disappointed—beginner of stories: a lost garden, a broken tablet, a father, king, lord frustrated at all the bumbling humans. He led my dreams and I walked the line, owned my friends’ “Miss Goody Two Shoes”, avoided words like “damn” (and definitely “fuck”), made a vow of purity in exchange for a pretty necklace and my parents’ approval. But I wondered, eventually, could there possibly be more than this Sunday-school-flannel-board-male being that hovered in my young mind? As I prayed “Dear Jesus …”, could God be—maybe . . . a wise woman? A thunderous clap? A divine spark in my pen, a speck floating through a ray of light shining over a church pew, a tiny square in a prison cell or the back of an airline seat-back tray? Do my beliefs change who He or She or the most powerful being utterly undefinable by a pronoun … is? Does—or could—my description affect any part of its’ divinity? And if I kneel in prayer or a wanderer falls to her knees at a sunrise and breathes out “fuck…”, is it any different?
D Larissa Peters grew up in Indonesia and has been somewhat of a nomad from Taiwan to Canada to the East Coast, but she now resides in California. Her recent poems have appeared in Pink Hydra and Isele Magazine.
