When the Father and the Son reach agreement, she appears—eyes open as a snake in dead noon, head grooving side to side. The message: There are three of me. We are bodies, not men. We dance to break each other. Suckling at the clouds is not her business. She is the drool the dog drops. The miracle— she spills on her shirt. When you hear the schoolbell and hightops streaking, she is the open hallway after, the half-cracked locker, tipped bin, plastic bottle dribbling. She speaks through prophets disguised as people asleep in the park—her speech, Should you outlive your life? wanders to the backyard where devil’s ivy vines the gutter grates. In rain, she is that which pours. In drought, she is the river’s drop to creek. What I’m telling you is that she empties herself. She empties herself until she becomes power.
People all buttoned up on the kneelers bow going breadbreadbreadbreadbread and Mrs. God stands at the back wall arms over chest like a principal catching kids red in the act of poorly drawn genitalia on the girls’ bathroom mirror. “Ave Maria”— who? “Maria.” Who? Who coughs the stars into light? Who is dark matter? The priest pours wine that tastes like courtly gestures. People bow and the black heart of church lights up. Who stood the tornado up? Who brought the sun down? Rattling legos in a plastic bag a boy gathers himself under a pew and does not stand, sit, kneel, and it is music to Mrs. God’s ears. You who bow to the flies kissing the heads of choir members, the holy water slurped by a bat, the subsequent burp, the robe sweat and light up sneakers ripping through the prayer aisle— you who start the ceremony with “I do not know what to do” and end “I do not know what to do”—please, you belong to Mrs. God. Come backward.
It all started with yoga women preaching the emptiness of being in their thousand-dollar voices smelling of lavender wearing lavender Lululemon and Mrs. God stood up and said, I won’t with them. And then the computers going Human? Human? Prove it! with a mosaic of blurry boats and which one is a sailboat? Mrs. God is not human by way of motorbus. The bicycles do not know who she is. Jesus, she said, this is the last cookie I will accept. The final horizon was a help line oaked with options all dead-ending in: how can I help you? It was here on hold that Mrs. God said to the Lord, Not everyone is coming to the land of hush. They who will not be led are plastic streets on which I will not be driving.
but she is not graspable. The lucky stand under her as under a ferris wheel whose baskets drip old rain and scattered voices that call to you in your first language— you lost it, didn’t you when the holes appeared in your ears, when you filled them with metal, when your whole mouth became magnetic. If only you or your mother or her mother understood. What is there to understand about a large animal passing in the night? What is there to know about elk absorbed in fog, then there, grazing— so physical you can almost taste their grass, almost feel the cricket wings coming apart in your teeth. She has nothing to do with you. She could kill you. Without her you would die.
Lily Greenberg is a poet from Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of In the Shape of a Woman. Her work has appeared in New England Review, On the Seawall, Cortland Review, and Eco Theo Review, among others, and she is the 2023 prize winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review‘s National Poetry Month Contest as well as the 2021 recipient of the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for Poetry. Her poetry has been funded by Bread Loaf Writers, ArtsWestchester, and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and she holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. She lives in Nyack, New York.
Stills from M, directed by Fritz Lang, and starring Peter Lorre. The film’s screenplay was written by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, and it was Lang’s first sound film.
