God must be a Man

Designed by Erin Choi.

Image Description: A girl with long brunette hair, rosy cheeks, and teary eyes sits daintily atop pink floral bedding in a traditionally girly room while holding a white porcelain mug with a pink flower painted onto it. She is eerily surrounded by floating eyeballs that are staring at her.

invisibly strung atop linen sheets
are limbs of a girl, cupping china
in delicate hands tied
to an ever-present puppeteering
of movements judged for their beauty
I am so disconnected from this body of a performer,
I forget it is mine,

somewhere, in the encumbered air before me is a pair of eyes
they mount no body,
but I know they are a Man’s
from the way they gape
expectantly

if these eyes could blink, they could cry,
but the seeping is drool
from burning refusal
to avert

I swan and sip
sensually, and swing
my hair forcing it to dance in shiny
swoops, pining for signs I am artful

floating in the reflection of this porcelain mug,
like a boat docked in a body
of water, is realization:

I am not a girl
I am a girl with a Man inside, watching a girl

a pregnancy, the most appalling kind
far worse than being locked in a cage,
my skin is the cage locking Him inside me
He peers through the keyhole in my mind

so long my ears have been stuffed
with a series of whispers
telling me God is a Man
and my lips voice “He”
off pages that say this Man watches all
that I do and this Man deems my worth
when the curtains close

so it must be Him I dress for
burlesquing the world in secrecy
to impress these disembodied hovering parts
that lade the air I drink

my solitude aches for autonomy
invariably cast as clay and sculpture, never artist,
I idle upon the spinning plate of a pottery wheel
like a statued ballerina in a music box
whose audience presumes she is dancing
despite her stillness on the twirling platform cranked
by some unknown hand
as He cinches my waist with both palms

there, is my body
      sucking in

like a ghost is drawing the soul straight out of me

and an oath escapes alongside it
unveiling itself, cuing
me to violently disgust the Man in my head
so that he may never return

I taunt Him with stomach rolls and slumped positions,
sunken eyes and fallen expressions,
the release of two decades’ dammed anger,
broken mirrors,
the snipping of puppet strings and pubic hairs by the same scissors,
the replacement of steeped flower juice with fermented barley for amusement’s sake,
and indifference
horrified, he believes he
is in a man’s bedroom instead
and self-consciously vacates