I
I quit Church and see God in a thousand
different ways as if She’s split
open like a fruit and all her seeds are glistening
gold and yellow. Well almost a thousand,
I mean, I see Her now like I should have
then, when I first learned that Jonah
was swallowed by a whale, not now, when I
am reading that story to my child &
wondering how exactly he survived all that
stomach acid and how come he never
had a whale named after him or at least a tuna,
something reasonable? Did you see that
man in Port Elizabeth? It was all over social
media. He was swallowed by a whale,
well, almost. He survived. Obviously. That’s
why the story’s told: and right after
he jumped back into the water. Crazy shit.
II
My grandmother, a secret priest, kept a private
Pantheon of gods next to her kettle: salt &
pepper shakers that looked like little blob
people, hugging. Six teaspoons
that shone like bells. Jars of spices for
secret embalming rituals. And
handwritten recipes for every kind of hunger
the heart could know, all bound in
string and a cutout from the YOU.
III
God’s faces multiply, at the coffee
shop She works two jobs for her meals
and sharpens her fists on
Tuesdays at boxing
and counsels every customer who cries, all
prophetic and promising new love, while
her eldest, only seven, sleeps in the kitchen,
eating grated cheese from an ice cream
container when he wakes.
IV
For this new God my tongue now learns new prayers. When I worship, it is not the sincere ramble of my son’s first As I Lay Me Down to Sleep, or the gentle collapse of my mother’s kneestofloor Hail Mary, throated and pure, or the jade forever of underwater in summer’s last swim, or the slow kiss of winter swell’s first petticoatwaves mouthing the shore, or even that first worshipful sip of morning coffee, sunrise haloed. If I pray tonight it is in my own unholy way, an amen in text, a hallelujah on Instagram, an undulating beseeching in tongues of flower emojis and a field of ???? like open palms, asking, calling
and God’s Word Made Flesh, Her Daughter, being
the youngest, is happy to answer
over text. I WhatsApp her at 3 a.m., saying: Our
*Loving Mother in Heaven*: how do I get
my sick son to sleep if his nose is blocked and he’s
overtired and fighting sleep like it’s plague
<heart emoji> and all I need is a couple hours please
so I don’t lose my shit <pleading hands emoji>
and I swear on my dead grandmother’s life <double heart>
that I’ve tried every remedy under your golden
sun but I’m tired of crying and not even to sleep.
My private saint, my channel to God, is no other than
the Star Queen of La Sticky Garlic Rice and the Colour
Orange, hitching babies to her hip like a virgin’s
dream, and in my hoarse psalm I tell her how I have
tried every pagan rite: a wish of Vix on my son’s
chest, a votive dab in the balls of his feet; tiger balm’s
promise under his nostrils; holy of holies, a humidifier
turned to maximum and I have laid my front to his
small pneumonic lungs, that hollow rasp emptying me,
the air catching in his throat like a harp being plucked
by devilish fingers and with each irregular note, he
throws his left arm over to me, searching for mom.
VII
Cut an onion in half, God replies, my God who has
fed my anemia with black beans and eased my pms with
Colombian chocolate and taught me to close my soul
to stop babies coming; whose own prayers are hot
and fast as if She is still in Honduras, as if Her
Spanish is blood and Her words are a loaded gun.
Cut an onion in half, She says, he’ll breathe
better. So I do and I pierce it with four cloves
and sit it beside his pillow like a sourbitter heart, a
sticky icon, a breathy Cross, and in this sweet
unorthodoxy, I hear my answered prayer: we sleep all the
night, waking to a new sun, the whole room smelling
like a mouth.
Megan Ross was born in Johannesburg in 1989. She is the author of Milk Fever, a collection of poetry published by uHlanga in 2018, as well as several short stories and works of nonfiction. Megan is the 2017 winner of the Brittle Paper Award for Fiction, an Iceland Writers Retreat Alumnus. She is a runner-up of the Short Story Day Africa and Short Sharp Award prizes. Her works have been featured in Catapult, GQ, Glamour, Mail and Guardian, and Prufrock. Megan works as a graphic designer, art director, and journalist. In her free time, she travels, plays football with her four-year-old son, and swims in the sea. She lives on the Wild Coast with her partner and child.