Helium

by Rudy Francisco

I’ve never seen exactly who it is that you paperclip your knees, meld your hands together, and pray to but I think I know what he looks like: I bet your God is about 5’10”. I bet he weighs 185. Probably stands the way a high school diploma does when it’s next to a GED. I bet your God has a mullet. I bet he wears flannel shirts with no sleeves, a fanny pack, and says words like “getrdun.” I bet your God watches FOX news, Dog the Bounty Hunter, voted for Donald Trump, and loves Bill O’Reilly. I bet your God is a politician from Arizona. I bet his high school served racism in the cafeteria and offered “hate speech” as a second language. I bet he has a swastika inside of his throat and racial slurs tattooed to his tongue just to make intolerance more comfortable in his mouth. I bet he has a burning cross as a middle finger and Jim Crow underneath his nails. Your God is a Confederate flag’s wet dream. Conceived on a day when the sky decided to slice her own wrists. I bet your God has a drinking problem. I bet he sees the bottom of the shot glass more often than his own children. I bet he pours whiskey on his dreams until they taste like good ideas, probably cusses like an electric guitar with Tourette’s plugged into an ocean. I bet he yells like a schizophrenic nail gun, damaging all things that care about him enough to get close. I bet there are angels in Heaven with black eyes and broken halos who claimed they fell down the stairs. I bet your God would’ve made Eve without a m...