Untitled

I am in a coffee shop where young Christians
tend to gather to talk about God
like wildebeests at a watering hole,
and even with their Bibles in hand,
they still sound so thirsty.

When I was a little girl in Sunday School,
the teacher gave me a white piece of paper, a four-pack of crayons,
and told me to draw how I imagined God.
I’ve been working on that picture for twenty years.

Today I imagine if God were here
at this table
he’d want to talk about coffee.
I imagine him sneezing and me left speechless
—what are you supposed to say, God bless you? That’s presumptuous
And laughing. I imagine God holds his chest as he laughs,
like Santa Claus.

I don’t mind imagining God a man
because I imagine he’d be fine
with the box of tampons under the sink
and my tears. Each drop the same salty consistency I’ve cried
since the tears of my birth.
Since I was twelve and everyone in my class hated me.
Since heartbreaks and deaths.
Since I started crying for no reason at all
except that it would feel good to stop.

I imagine he’d understand how
we can have so much to be sorry for
without being able to say I’m sorry.
He’d know that saying it never changes anything.
and it only comes as an afterthought.

And he’d have mercy on the dirty dishes
stacked up in my sink.

I imagine God on a motorcycle
riding down the freeway in the HOV lane.
As he rides past I can see
on the back of his leather jacket is a patch that says
“You’ll die too.” True.
Especially the way the white lines weight my eyelids
behind the wheel a four-wheel drive and a false sense of security.
“What is it you’re really afraid of?”
He’d ask me when I caught up to him
at the next rest stop, drinking the free coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
I imagine God would go bungee jumping with me.
I imagine his favorite food is funnel cakes.

I imagine God sitting here with me.
I ask him: “How many people in the world are crying right now?
This very second?”
“Such a predictable question,” he says, smiling.
“Here, let’s do this one instead,” he says. “Ask me
how many people all around the world are
at this second
picking their noses.”
And he laughs.