Apparently, God Can Get A Little Lonely,

Amalie Kwassman

a rabbi joked once. He likes our praise,
so often when I talk to God
I talk about everything
extra beautifully with lots of similes,
as if God were a bad poet.
I tell Him that the rain He made
sounds like angels singing against my door,
and flowers are like God's graffiti on earth.

And if that doesn’t work,
we just talk about the weather
and how my mother is doing.
No mention of how I get slightly turned on
by men in tight jeans on the subway.

I want to ask Him why
my left breast is slightly smaller than my right
and how I can stop feeling
self-conscious about it.
Also, why isn't there more
comfortable women's underwear?

I want to ask where He thinks
my dead father is. Is he somewhere
along the skyline, and I can't see him
because the buildings in New York are too tall?
Or is he cramped inside a coffin, plenty
of time now to consume Reader's Digest?

I want to beg Him not to let me die yet.
To plead that no one shoots up the subway
or the movie theater tonight. And I wish
He would breathe a promise into my bones
that we will always have each other to talk to,
that neither one of us will ever be alone.

Amalie Kwassman is originally from Brooklyn, New York. She is a current MFA candidate in the Creative Writing & Environment program at Iowa State University and poetry editor of Flyway. She was awarded a tuition grant to study at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Her work has been published in Booth, Hyperallergic, The Ilanot Review, Punchnel's, and elsewhere. Most recently, her poem was a finalist in The Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize.