we don’t believe like we used to & other poems
By Jaime Marvin
we don’t believe like we used to
We don’t believe like we used to,
that’s a common knowledge. In the old days
everyone prayed morning and night,
and the sky always smiled, and women
had yet to invent unhappiness.
But that’s because we are always
in the future, we are three steps ahead of what day it is.
You know that of course
in the past they believed in things—
believed in the underworld,
put coins on eyes, sacrificed goats in the village square.
Blood soaked the earth
like a prime steak, and everyone exhaled
in the morning.
And in the past there was probably
a man on his front porch, too old to slice wheat,
who had seen things.
On his good days he told the children,
too young to slice wheat,
that way back before there was
winter the gods walked among us.
When the gods walked among us
there were butterfly wafers that
tasted like gold in everyone’s pocket.
And your skin would sometimes get a thin sheen,
gray and ocean, like oil. That was where
the gods touched you, if you were
ever so lucky
to brush them without wrath.
After walking among the people all day,
touching hands and wearing their feet thin,
the gods surely gossiped at their hearths
about how in the old days
there was no separation between
stuff and push, or between
eyes and hands, or between
seraphim and daffodils and
monsters who live soft in the rain.
This was before Atlantis
had risen up from the sea of course,
and before God had invented magic,
or flooded the world.
In the old days, before the universe
had curdled inward and then
bloomed out forever in the prettiest
billow, one almost-atom said to another
did you hear? once upon a time there was no
space at all. nothing had to exist. imagine
the holiness of it.
now we toil long and hard to stay
buzzing into eternity. and
believing makes my neck sweat.
I saw a god in a tree stump once.
Headless and armless and sitting and glowing
and something else entirely.
I waved, stroked its boundless body,
and it said something,
maybe hello. or maybe go on. or maybe
whispered a name
Objects in the Road (I Don’t Know If We Were Made for Such Speed)
One racoon, flattened: perfect
makings for a hat— in another time,
when we were crueller
than we are now. A crust of leaves I think
was oak. A lot of those around here. Maybe,
actually, it’s just one of the few trees
I know how to identify. A pillow
dirty, brushed-by, formerly
paisley, chintz, brocade,
and flattened too, which suits it,
not in the same way it suited the racoon,
but just as much. Unshapen
white cloths on the road’s edge, drooped like heavy cream,
I blur past before I can see if they are
shirts or sheets, but either way I know they touched flesh.
Just before home, I spot a crunch,
a leaf, brown bark like hollow bone, small as a bird,
just as easy to run over. And I want to
behold the world softly, awed, all my doors flung open,
humbled, as was Noah seeing land,
learning how solid was the world beyond him,
remembering all at once.
Jaime Marvin is a writer, comedian and tarot reader based in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2019 with a degree in English and Italian. Most days, she can be found trying to make the perfect soft-boiled egg (and is also occasionally found at @jaime_marvin on Twitter or at
jaime-marvin.com).