Poetry by Minha Choi
My God is a carton of soybean milk and senbei rice crackers on a Sunday. Sometimes he was a rainbow rice cake, sometimes he was an apple juice box, and sometimes he was seeing my parents after 12 p.m. on Sundays, our family stopping at the famous noodle place nearby before going home.
My God, hananim, framed up on the walls of our cleanly presbyterian church, chibi-style man with circle blush, brown bouncy hair, matching bushy beard, a white long-sleeve long clothing with a dash of red fabric across his block of a body. Like a cartoon character I saw at the dentist’s office entrance.
My God. The mood ring necklace I wore in middle school.
My God from Bruce Almighty (2003) watched in 2010 at a hotel lobby eating fruit loops for the first time ever. The sweet swishing inside the mouth instantly connects with the carefree, evocative scenes where Morgan Freeman, black God in a blinding white suit, wraps one arm around Jim Carry’s confused shoulders.
My God as a picture hung on the bathroom door of a friend’s old house. A white man with red cheeks, mouth wide open and laughing towards what I can only assume is heaven. Brown, shoulder length hair and a tall nose. We couldn’t help but laugh at him, could we? There Yesu was, laughing in the basement of a Korean household, guarding the toilet.
My God, her veiny weathered hands that I held beside the tv light.
My God as black letters pressed on thin paper stacked and stacked, protected by a black leather zip-up cover. King James version online, Verdana font size 12, marching through the sentence from left to right. When My God left all of that to be thin air and atmosphere surrounding me in prayer.
My God as a character in the christian backdrop of an erotic fanfiction I read in high school. My God forming himself in my throat, a round O, lips touching and parting to say my, the tongue meeting the roof to finish him. Oh my God.
My God. The same sunset I see every fall everywhere I go.
My God at the altar of my lover’s father’s house, a painting of a figure with the head of an elephant, at the tip of the lit incense a faint ember glow, whispering trails of smoke circled thrice, at the edge of the almond that I bit, the tip of her hands grazed My God over the selection of dried fruit and nuts that would be fed to me.
My God as a small Ganesh figurine with a broken arm from all the travels he protected my lover from, home to the dorms and then back, gazing at me as I stare with intention back at him.
My God an overhead light that is way too bright, peering down to see me curled up on the bathroom floor, agonizing over every grammar mistake I’ve ever made, every capitalization of words such as Church, Christian, Prayer…
My God a gray stone statue of Buddha as tall as the mountain that I stood on, his right-hand palm held out in front of him, as if gently telling me to go back. Dispersed through the motions of prayer is Bucheonim, a swirling pattern of a ceiling red, yellow, green, blue fading down onto the backdrop of the temple. My God then swooped down as a bird to peck at the rice offerings.
My God, the a, b, c, and d I learned to survive in New Jersey. My God who is a scrivener that writes everything down on paper, down to the perfume bottle that I hurled at my brother in that argument we had in 2016.
My God. The biggest grin I’ve ever worn in my childhood.
