On this world they worship a child god – god of insects, god of complicated relationships. Their god is bound to termites and gnat swarms, infinite in his attention to detail and cascading consequence, and bored, so goddamn bored with the pedestrian plots of talking bipeds. The exaltation of larks is ok, the wheeling flash of the school of herring, but their god has spent time sanctifying every soul in a hive, the collective and the infinite individuals, held fully and simultaneously in the divine heart without diminishing any part of the waggling crowd. We try to explain the attraction of omnipotence as we talk to their temple tenders, over tea steeped from local leaves. Priests, of a sort, they laugh and laugh at our ideas and say yes, we also. We worship the details. And then, they say, we have sense enough to let go. God loves the details, a word that also means dust mites. They are at peace with simplicity, the dullness of their loves and overstuffed lives and overreaching ambitions that crumble away to nothing given enough time. Their god tolerates them with wellsprings of patience to stir the world, to live meaty lives, to feed the maggots in time. On this world there’s no way to fail your pious destiny. The pressure is off. Their god has pudgy, sticky fingers and a charismatic laugh. We can’t, says the priest who rakes the leaves of the temple yard, after the overwintering and before the new grass, wait to see him grown.
Shana Ross is a poet newly arrived in Edmonton, Alberta after 25 years in New England. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, Ruminate, Gone Lawn, Kissing Dynamite, SWWIM and more. She was awarded first place in the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition, received a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly. Her first chapbook, Heavy Little Things (Finishing Line Press) is now available. She holds both a BA and MBA from Yale and rarely tweets @shanakatzross.