Still Life With God by Cynthia Atkins

Dear Cynthia Atkins, 

As a child I would lose my God on purpose. Leave him in my lunchbox, or send him through the laundry with my school clothes. I couldn’t seem to shake God. I’d chew him up with my Paella and swallow, only to cough him back up in an argument. After Catholic school I was able to lock God in the closet of my adolescent bedroom. I’d visit him on Christmas and Easter, and for nothing more, forever. Recently I was sent into treatment for Anorexia Nervosa (a title of one of your poems) where we talked a lot about God and where to find him. For some, God is the scale, the drug, or the drink, while for others he is the burned coffee pot in the corner, the green light before the church, or whatever it is that keeps waking them up in the morning. 

You write about the inability to shake off the generic, taught, God and the irony of being haunted by sanctity and should-haves. Your book is a cliff-dive into the self, a series of mirrors, some double sided, where you make music out of Traffic and Phone Booths: “Memory of a phone booth holding a voice in the pecking hours of rain”. The four parts of Still Life With God are expertly crafted to catalog the trauma and growth of a speaker through childhood, the home, the body, and through religion’s on-again-off-again relationship with the universe. 

Through a series of personifying God as various objects and ideas: a library, a medicine cabinet, and alibi, and, most notably, a myth, you present an alternative resolution to the argument, “why does God let bad things happen?” If God doesn’t come from a peer-reviewed textbook he has an alibi. While reading your book, the speaker continuously shouts at me from behind a mirror to wake up and recognize God again as, “drunk at 2 a.m.” in a Denny’s bathroom or as “the thinnest red line that connects us.” You craft a universe where finding identity beyond the acknowledgement of God is essential to our self-portrait.

Maybe God has favorites, maybe he has a weak stomach– abandonment issues. The trauma detailed in many of these poems is difficult and necessary. The speaker says that there are “no testimonials as to how to derail / this anguish of breathing, of losing.” Maybe God didn’t like happy endings. Maybe, like you say, “there is no doubt, Mother Nature was / raped by God.” Beyond the various personifications of God you also use bold choices in language to depict helpless feelings like terror: “Terror is not bliss- it is / invisible and dangerous. It brings hearts home in body bags. / It gags your own mouth with stones.” Your other deafening choices lie in bold critiques of homophobia, racism, and gun violence. You mock a society plagued by intolerance when you say, “I’ve heard that gay cakes are not made with / mother’s milk, but drizzled with the glutinous / innards of dead children.”

Your poems on the body, specifically, “My Body is a Vessel” reminded me of my time in treatment. I was without access to a mirror for several months. I forgot my vessel, “my body worked / hard at being anonymous,” thus forgetting the rules it had previously been told to follow. I became something boundless without cracks or edges, and I think you understand this.

There is a shift in tone in the latter half of your book following the birth of the speaker’s son. The child weaves joy and purpose into these lines: “My son / scowled his first breath, it hit like a package / thrown to the stoop. He was the cure hugging / the poison.” This gentleness echoes the first breath of air after a rebirth. In your final poem I was granted a similar release so necessary it aches: “My past until this moment / is penciled in the way an artist suggests a cloud. / This is the narrative- repeat it, repeat after me. / I never existed before this moment.”

I found God in every poem, whether I wanted him there or not. 

Your fan, 

Kimilee Norman