God in Her Ruffled Dress by Lisa B

Toward the beginning of God in Her Ruffled Dress, the poet is commanded, Write me, write me, write me, and Lisa B writes—lines clenched between her teeth like a bridle’s bit or the pit of a sour cherry. From its provocative title to the last sentence, this strange, heretical book surprises, devastates, and delights.

God is one central theme of the book, but not so much the One Dad God as the body created in God’s image. Even in the first poem, a prayer, God is the bodies of all the men I’ve loved, but also breasts, and unpronounceable / …carved in stone / particles of sand and granite adhering into a tablet / a forgotten language (“God No. 2”). Bodies are fallible and magical at once. If God is found in human bodies, then also in the bodies in mass graves.

Subsequent poems take up the question of what it means to live in a body. A Jewish body with its genetic storehouse / in the back of her neck (“The Contract”); a body with Type 1 Diabetes with its white hem of cells. The context expands and contracts, keeping us off balance. In “Watching the Sea,” testing one’s blood sugar is like looking into the ocean:

I’m doing what a patch of cells
forgot to do.
A still underpart of a cave in my body
forgot to be part of the sea.
For an instant I am inside that sea.
A face above peers through the water,
its huge eyes green,
alert and round,
the face vague and then clear
through the waves, the stillness, the waves.

A still underpart of a cave in my body forgot to be part of the sea.

Lisa B is also an accomplished jazz and groove musician with seven albums, and she is a trained psychic. No wonder then that we encounter musicians here, with their melodious bodies; no wonder that the poems dive so deeply into one consciousness after another. In “Trane’s Ride (Naima),” jazz great John Coltrane gets mixed up with the metaphor of a horse’s body:

I wanted to talk from God.
The hooves beat in my throat
plowing up notes
and from the dust cloud
poured a train of horses.

The same poem ends with color:

It was blue behind my eyes, indigo
soft and unspoken. I felt the pain
ease, a forgetfulness
like a horse I finally let go.

And consider color. In “Some Things to Do with Pain,” where the body (presumably the poet’s body) is itself an instrument, and pain manifests as an explosion of colors:

Watch each rung of vertebra
light up
with a tone,
brown, ochre,
green, climbing the scale,
rolling through kidney and lung and heart,
the top of your head trembling,
neck tendons long
thick strings to lean into too,
the white blue
blue gold high notes
shaking the arch of your cathedral head

Divided into four sections (“Return to the Body,” “Drum the Beginning of the World,” “Sever the Head,” and “Propagate”), God in Her Ruffled Dress insists that we, too—despite (and because of) our sexy, smoky, moldering, disruptive bodies—are part of the body of God, and that God is not who we think she is.

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Bethany Reid‘s stories, essays, and poems have recently been published in Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide, Kithe, Descant, Peregrine, and Catamaran.
Her fourth full-length collection of poems, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm, won the 2023 Sally Albiso Award from MoonPath Press. She blogs about writing and life at www.bethanyareid.com.