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  • A Man Tries to Explain God to Me
  • Emma Bolden (bio)

using the lyrics to "Jack and Diane." His God is twolovers thudding to the bassline in the backseat, hisGod's a football star who for His debutante would layHis body down in the path of a train and I don't ask the man

how God isn't also the train and the tracks and the madconductor, I don't ask if God is Jack or Diane or the storyabout them. I know there's no answer clearer than confusion,which is also what I know about God. And what I know about

God is this. Nothing. Except perhaps that if God camewith easy metaphors he wouldn't be God. He'd be man,whipping every back to bare with Bible verses as his belt.Life goes on, and sometimes deep in the fever of a memory

I know might actually have been a dream, I feel likeI'm almost beginning to understand that to be holy is nothinglike a love or a song or a flower but a blooming right in frontof the eyes that will never see, as long as we call them ours. [End Page 149]

Emma Bolden

Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t) ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, and other publications. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly.

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