Sophie Panzer
Bad Jew
I’ve never dated someone who doesn’t believe in god they say and I say huh but what I mean is god is sometimes, she is never, she is splashes of hot oil from a pan, pink rivulets running down my leg in the shower, how can I say god comes out when the guests arrive, with the nice china, takes ablutions from too-sweet wine, sacrifices of boiled bones, speaks in the sound of a dead radio host asking great-grandmother what’s the difference between Russia and America and her slow, accented reply soldiers knock here, how can I tell them we don’t talk much because god couldn’t come to the phone in the ‘40s so he lives in a museum now, shuffling through old papers, collecting dust, exhaling that cough drop and velvet curtain smell, waiting for visitors, though most of his children don’t want him around because of the things he says about women and gays, but we still visit a couple times a year to talk about the good old days.
Hourglass Love
We were together for six weeks which is more when you’re gay because time folds in on itself, stretches like bubblegum passed between tongues, loops like legs over legs on a first date that lasts for eight hours of staring, willing yourself into other skin as we tell the usual stories of knowing and hiding and saying and firsts that were more like false starts, the ones we reach for and know will be there without looking, like limbs in the dark, and the ones we don’t know, the ones that remind us we’re really made of the churros you ate in Spain, the sled I steered into a bale of hay, and then in a day or a month or an hour it’s time to either U-Haul or move on to other things, but what a nice year that was, what better way to spend an afternoon?