for Jair Cortés
He said he suffered a strange affliction
for a parish priest: God dyslexia—
He only saw the hand of the divine
behind the drug-cartel dystopia
that had replaced his city, his chosen hell,
and wished God had the courage to forget
humanity, and asked me if I thought
that God in fact did not possess free will.
Because my Spanish falters when I’m tired,
I might’ve slipped and said God was la puerta
instead of muerto. He called me a liar.
God, he said, was like a cholera
we don’t attempt to cure, a nonsense word
we pass on like a cough into a crowd.