Erika Walsh is a co-founder and editor of A VELVET GIANT, a genreless literary journal. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Hobart, Peach Mag, Juked, and elsewhere. She was selected as a semi-finalist in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. She lives in NY, NY, where she teaches writing to children and teens.




Erika Walsh

No place but where god is

No place but where god shines a light to examine The tube of your throat (your halo your hole). Where god got evicted. Where god got covered by the earth when we made it. Where heaven got a sheet tossed over it. Where god is ms. schmidt with a white paper cup. One little black olive floats at the rim. She says imagine we’re in ancient greece? Now everyone eat one olive. You are the one who will hold the fruit and will look at it and who will not eat. Where god is years and years later when you finally bite into an olive, elliptic and salted. You think not of greece but of italy. The ocean someone who gave birth to someone who gave birth to someone who gave birth to you once had to cross and she was scared — The olive slick with oil — slick only with what you would expect — whole and unchewed at the pit of your sacrum hung on to the spine between two wings of bone — hollow, a knot. It feels almost like right before cumming. God keeps you open so you won’t mind. Where god kissed you hard on the mouth

and opened the holes in your jeans

made them big with red scissors.

Where god is an olive you won't — you would not ever — swallow. Too scared that the pit will fall into your throat. Where god eats the future out of a box for take-out and god eats the future out of a box for keeping thimbles and god eats the future out of a music box where god throws you hard across the pool but god is now only playing a game. Your neck bent to one side crooked like a hook. Where god saw him take her to the back room of a store where a man said there would be a job for her and there was never any job for her. God watched him close the door and god did not say stop god did not break the lock or call for any kind of help god did not smooth her hair back with soft knuckles when she cried god did not explain how this is what happened this is the name for it this is what you do now this is the sheet to peer past and to breathe under when you need to be somewhere nice and just for one moment in the light. God says do you mind. God says I saw you at the park. You were crying with a woman who was once a girl taken badly to the back room of a store. Did you happen, then, to see my dog run scared by that tree with some leaves on his head? His little god-paw. God says will you help me make this poster. I god-lost someone. I’m sad. I cannot tell the green from red.



Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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