Maggie Devers
One Poem Only
playing god by Michaela Godding
0:00
-2:27

playing god by Michaela Godding

playing god

Michaela Godding
(The average person forgets ninety percent of their dreams. I have started keeping tallies on a notepad next to my bed to keep track of all the forgetting. I wonder if endings are all we can rely on. I wonder and wonder and remember that eighty percent of the human body’s heat comes out from the head and I wonder if wondering will burn me to pieces.)

They say that life is easier when you are younger, that you can breathe and swallow at the same time until you are seven months old, that as a four-year-old you ask approximately four hundred and fifty questions a day. They say that what you can’t control you should put in god’s hands. My hands have twenty-seven bones, twenty-nine joints and at least one hundred and twenty-three other named ligaments but I wonder. I wonder about the unnamed ones. I wonder about the fifty thousand cells that will die and be replaced in the body by the time you finish reading this sentence.

More from

  • @michaelagodding on Instagram

  • Her book, the year our grandmothers died, from AOS Publishing will be released February 2026.

  • Her chapbook, Dwelling, is out now from Bottlecap Press.


You can listen to me read Michaela Godding’s, Poem For a Mother Six Years Out of Prison, over on Instagram @rembrandts.cure

Submissions are currently closed. Check back soon to hear when they open. Sign up for the latest alerts: maggie-devers.mailerpage.io 🍎

Discussion about this episode

User's avatar