If God Is Real
By Coryna Ogunseitan
Climate and racial justice scholar Coryna Ogunseitan had me at “God plays hooky with her girlfriend at the skate rink”. “If God is Real” was the first ever submission to bad buddhists. When I read it, I grinned and thought, wow, is this poem real? There is some serious talent in our community. In this dismal world, I giggled with delight reading Coryna’s playful, whimsical prose. You’re in for a fun ride. I hope you’re inspired to find just as much whimsy and delight between the dark clouds of your day as Coryna dishes out to us.
--anuradha bhagwati, executive editor
If God Is Real, Why Am I So Blue?
If
God is the sum of us God plays hooky with her girlfriend at the skate rink God had braces in middle school God paid to get adult braces as soon as they got their first real job God braids the sweetgrass so long it can yoke the Sun to the Earth God’s friends stopped using he/him pronouns to refer to them God’s friends stopped capitalizing God’s pronouns but not her name God has relatives who “just don’t get it, isn’t they for two people?” God sends them lovingkindness and sits at the other side of the table during family reunions texting God is our shared ancestor God is our Uncle Eel who didn’t understand why all the kids were growing feet and walking and leaving the ocean where it’s “safe and we know people” God didn’t want to leave the water God wanted desperately to leave the water God split herself in two (or three, four, five, a thousand) God is always losing count it’s not easy being infinite and dyscalculic God stepped onto the land with their new webbed feet God is the chicken who descended from heaven and scattered grain to form the continents God became salt so she could stay in the water
Is it enough to be yoked to the Earth? Is gravity a universal principle? If so, why can air—apparently—float? Is the breath yoked to the Earth or to the body? Is the body the same as the Earth? Is the breath the soul escaping towards the sun?
Real suns have more than eight planets and a fake, junior Real souls don’t have bodies Real souls can reach enlightenment without incarnating and adopting the illusion of the singular self Real souls have nothing to transcend they identify as post-transcendence Real souls wear pink Real souls are much like real men a construct Real souls are over it all the real souls are fucking each other everybody has already dated especially the lesbians they’re on season sixteen million
Why shouldn’t I spend my evenings watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills eating cookies painting my nails gold like the sun or pink like my heart crying when the housewives drop their kids off at college and then cry on the way home on their private jets? Why doesn’t sentimentality count as empathy? Why don’t more people cry in the cinema? Why am I the always only one crying? Why does love so often contain grief? Why should a person ever sleep in such a big house all alone?
Am I alone?
I understand the concept of a singular, sovereign self to be a function of thinking that emerged from Colonialism Capitalism White Supremacy the Enlightenment air quotes eye roll sigh I want to stop using the I pronoun but I can’t So long, me my mine myself So long, part of me that speaks So long, part of me that stands So long, part of me that withstands the unrelenting heat Blue is the warmest color Blue is—get this—a conspiracy: Blue is not the name of the sky according to somebody’s two-year-old daughter who said “pink and green and rainbow” when asked to identify the color so far above Blue is the distance Blue endures Blue is the accumulation of space of nothing of the great emptiness we spin in that is so, so, full
Coryna Ogunseitan is a Yoruba Buddhist and yogini based on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land colonized as Oakland, California. Coryna is pursuing a PhD in medical anthropology to research how climate change impacts mental health, and is also the program manager of Beloved Community Circles, an emerging decentralized network of circles of people committed to using dharma to support their local racial and climate justice work.
That is poetry
riiight?