The nearest building beckoned me,

a white cross slicing the sky

like a wound in flesh,

a pale welcome to the foolhardy.

Five feet to the ground

might as well have been five hundred;

the earth stretched wide.

Up there, beside God,

I could not be afraid.

He was silent, watching

with indifferent eyes as I leapt.

No holy hand reached out

to catch me as I tore

through heaven’s thin skin.

I expected too much and got only

the soft grass below—

a touch which would return me

to my mother’s arms,

to my first breath, in the hospital’s

bright, sterile light, swaddled in

blood and afterbirth.

Between sky and ground,

in that short moment of falling,

the truth I had long denied

came clear—God was never there.

I had confused my mother’s

arms for wings, her touch for the divine.

Yes, because God could

watch me jump from every

church roof in the world

and never once reach to catch me.

But my mother,

she would still answer the phone

if I called.