God is a teenage girl.
She likes to dress in pink, and she is weary from omniscience
and the living of countless Nestorian lives,
all of which add up to a Sweet Sixteen next year.
Her hair and beard and arching, kissing brows
are black and thick,
like Dionysus drawn on cups,
and she is prettiness incarnate.

Some turn to her in prayer
when the gamble falls through and the safe is wiped clean,
and the kids must return to public school.
They cry to the heavens, “What am I worth? What at all could I be worth?”
The pragmatic ones, the nurses and the solo mothers,
don’t want to take her time, think they know themselves for sure,
until pain seizes their joints or limbs or minds,
and won’t let go until they die,
and their beautiful perceptive daughters are eating fish sticks alone and learning not to mention
tears.

And God the Father, God the Son, God the Big Sister
strokes her thick black beard and says,
“Oh my child, you deserve because you are pretty.
The first glint of worth lies inside you always,
like quartz in the sun.
For I am ancient and shiny new,
and I am queer and queer is holy,
and I take you all into my hands,
from the saints in pink to the sinners who spin their gold to suits of gray.”

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Julia Bea is a recent graduate in Latin, ancient Greek, and mathematics from Bryn Mawr College. She writes everything from literary analysis to sports essays about girlhood, generations, and self-knowledge.