Ron Riekki
I Keep Getting into Fistfights with God Every Sunday
I need to just give up and sit in the back pew
like a child in the good old days when I'd sleep
through church. Now I fight with politics
and movie ticket prices and youtube ads, as if
my church is wrath, the wrinkles in my lungs
foreshadowing a hundred thunderbolts landing
on my failures. But I argue back that I believe
in God, otherwise I wouldn't fight Him. It takes
faith to argue, the belief in belief, how moronic
we all are, and the monk tells me that not
thinking is better than being naked in July.
Bio
Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).