God Speaks

God will want nothing to do with you
as long as you won’t
cut your hair, the sweet old
witch told me

as we smoked on the corner
outside her store,
the bookstore where I spent almost
every hour I wasn’t working.

I remembered then that I’d heard
she’d packed up everything she owned
and moved here from New Orleans two weeks before The Flood.
Was it a whim, a dare, a premonition?

I used to be brave about the possibility
that the more I looked like Jesus, the greater the chance
I’d be ignored at Judgement Day among the other
wannabe Messiahs. I refused to be confused with them,

so I cut my hair the next morning
before going out. I figured
she must know something, what with
that hair, those books,

that light around her.