Issue 7, Winter/Spring 2009

God Is President, She's the Rose of the World, by Ana Bozicevic

 
When it’s that time of month
it’s like falling backwards in “time.”

God has abandoned her glass carriage,
she is “dead.”

And the edges of objects: wavy
in the eye that’s about to cry,

a twitter running down the spine of…
Oh God, it can’t be. (Insert song of mourning.)

God and time, spine of the world – yawn, blah, blah, schma…
what I meant to say is

it’s hard to be a capitalist.

If the world’s time is God, and she’s birds
atwitter, then why must I go to work?
The answer writes itself:

left to my own devices I’d just sink into the soil.
That is, write, with dirt

as my pillow.     In the hole between twitters

there’s random patches
of mud-sky. So humid.

There’re chairs growing in hell.

There’re chairs growing in hell,
and people sit on them, my co-workers:
it’s like riding on toadstools

except you don’t know it, or
you kind of know it that time of

month.
That’s when you feel the twitter, the muddy shiver.

You dream of your uncle turning a lamb on a spit
high on a green cliff, with fog thickening around him

and then he’s made to swallow keys and little hammers—

you claw the red clay.
Now wake.
Show me the bouquet!

No, don’t show me the bouquet.

Show me the bouquet!
If you do, I won’t tell on you

to the rose of the world. She can make him hear you up there.
Besides, it’s not a cliff, it’s a chair.

And the rose is God.
Got it?
Gott it?

This is why women should be President.