In the Bible Belt
everyone prays for you, especially
if they don’t like you very much.
As I understand it, praying
for someone you don’t even like
is worth more to God,
since it proves you’re not petty.
Then, when your enemies succeed,
you can take all the credit.
I never liked the phrase “Bible Belt”
because it made me imagine
an angry man taking his belt off
to chase me with it through the south.
Living in the age of antiheroes,
I’ve learned some people are so curious
about the end of the world
that they’ll elect a little heap of entrails
just to see what happens next.
There’s a way to believe in God
that lets you think you’ll be held harmless
in the face of any evil
you invite to prosper in the world.
I didn’t know that before.
If I were God, I would be embarrassed
by some of my facebook friends.
I would remove my belt
to see who thought I was playing.
And every time I heard a mockingbird
imitate a car alarm, I would
turn the world off & cry.
Figure 8
A blood-red cardinal
watches me watching
the snow fall,
the lake a mirror image
split along my grief.
Believing in ghosts,
I wait for the message
but I never catch it
over the sound
of my own breathing,
my breath a fog
so white
I could write
my name in it.
In December,
skating the lake
on the coldest day
of the year,
the more I circle
the same ground
the more it disappears
beneath me.
And maybe beneath
this lake there’s another
me, not bleeding.
A woman in garnet
turning circles
on black glass
watching the ice
grow so thick
she’ll never know
how close she came
to catching my face
in the mirror,
hearing my voice
come out of her mouth.
Emily Skaja is the author of Brute, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Black Lake, forthcoming from Graywolf in 2026. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.