In Which the Baby Bird Asks, Are You My Mother?

By Julie DeBoer

In this new world, God can contort into any shape. A tropical storm,
a bulldozer, a selectively-visible force eld that can only be seen from Sedona. If you’ve got the cash and can learn to squint your eyes just right, God can be as pink as cotton candy. Hell, God can even bend into a metonym for TV dinners. Daily bread of my generation, and I can feel the eyes of the next one rolling. You sound like a Boomer. Isn’t everything a TV dinner?

Whatever. I slouch in front of the TV with my regular old dinner and resume a Netix series about women with facelifts who sell mansions in Hollywood. Powerful, badass Barbies. God could be a Barbie like that.

Which brings us to the inevitable elephant. God used to be a man, until #MeToo. At which time HR awkwardly informed him that it would be in his best interest to give up the domineering boss-man shtick. Too close to home. And frankly, it’s about time.

Anyway. Even Ariana Grande thinks that God should be a woman. If God were a woman, she would be a CEO. Or a mother, I suppose. Now you can be both. God is a powerful, badass CEO Barbie mom. I can see her now, holding a laptop and a latte. Standing tall and condent at the daycare door, where she waits and smiles and waves and waits and is rapidly beginning to fret. She has left us too long in the care of strangers, we don’t know her face anymore.

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About Author

Julie DeBoer is a poet and psychotherapist living in Seattle, Washington. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Android Journal, Gulf Coast, Ruminate, Sugar House Review, Bracken Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @JulieDeBoer.