The Friday Poem: ‘Needing Religion at Nineteen’ by Haro Lee

A new poem by Haro Lee.

Needing Religion at Nineteen

-1

My mother can feel God baking.
He is kneading the dough now, and
the red and brown foliage of maple trees
is crushed into the earth. He flips
the dough, and just like that, it is
winter. She’ll have me in the
following March, in the year of the rat,
which I thought was very unsexy
all my life. Once I was at a party
and a white girl born in the year
2000 lifted her skirt to show me a crimson
dragon tattooed up her hip. I thought,
you and your sultry dragon can fuck
right off. Then years later, I saw an
exhibition of Banksy’s Rat series
and the small cream placard beneath it
said that a single rat could bring
an entire civilisation to its knees.
OK, I’ll take that for why I’m here then.

9

I’m in the rural countryside of
bumfuck nowhere in New Zealand.
Mum’s teaching a bible study
at my sister’s summer church camp but
I’m too young to sit through them. Instead,
I stretch out on a threadbare trampoline
under the twilight blue. There’s a
pōhutukawa tree nearby dipping with
its giant blooming head in prayer. Dusk
siphons off the clouds in the sky.
There are no stars yet. I see an airplane
slice through, like a wasp. scraping its
stinger across the sky’s gradient,
revealing the canvas beneath it all.
The well of the night is opening itself.
I look for my reflection. If I could plunge
my fingers, their tips would dampen
with the silver of constellations. Stretch
a little further, and they’d be stained with
purple cloudbursts of gas and dust and stars
of a milky way. But maybe not in
this town. I lower my arms back down.
When I tilt my neck, I’m like a newborn,
trying to find my maker’s eyes.

19

I am clumsy with romance, falling for
fools who don’t want me back. In Korea,
there was a boom of babies born in the
year of the tiger, planned by couples who
wanted their future children to be brave,
charming, resilient leaders. The boy that
works as a server at a local Korean
restaurant tells me how he steals oxycodone
from the bedside of his dying friend. I
think I’m in love. My body is fine, but
whenever I look in the mirror, I feel like the
ugliest girl on the planet. I’m nineteen,
technically a woman, but deeply in the
waxing crescent of a moon. I hate staying
put, being still and good, I think I’ll
never die. My friends and I drive home
from the club high as shit and I eat and
snort and fuck anything that distracts
me from the weird meditation that settles
in my mind, like the silence that
surrounds oil paintings hung in a museum
at night. I don’t like the way their eyes
follow me, as if I’m in some gothic horror.
Where were God’s eyes when Jae died?
I’m starting to think he doesn’t exist.
I don’t feel the proof. When I call, he isn’t
there. I don’t think anyone is listening.
If they are, they don’t really care.

29

It’s nearly the year of my Saturn return.
Right now, no one in my family likes
me very much, except for possibly
the first time, my alcoholic father. My
mother, two sisters and grandmother get
tired of talking to me on the phone.
They hate my jokes and I am reckless with
money and Grandma thinks I’ve gained
a bit of weight. I broke off my engagement
with Joe and spend my days watching
Real Housewives. There’s never been
a better time in history to be a woman
than no. I download dating apps and
meet men who paint their nails and
attend protests for trans rights and
they still shove my head down and
choke me. I can’t cuss out my ex-fiancé
because he has our sex tape. My feelings
on the afterlife are that I’ll never kill
myself, because despite scientific
evidence of the big bang and Pangaea
and fossilised footprints of dinosaurs,
every time the plane goes through
turbulence, my gut reaction is to
pray. And if this is hell right now,
imagine if I have to keep doing this
in eternal damnation forever.
No thanks. If it turns out there is no
God, that when we close our eyes
that’s it, then I’ll wait this one out
for as long as it lasts. Better safe
than sorry. And even though things
aren’t that great now, I’ll just keep doing
my best, so when it’s my time to go,
I can say that I tried. That through all the
grief and heartache and many mistakes,
there was a little bit of sweetness.
So maybe water never turned into wine.
Jesus would still love a whore like me.

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