By Michael Derrick Hudson
Featured Art: “War of the Worlds on Denim” By Nicholas Skaldetvind

Who wants a frowny Crusader in dusty armor and spurs
clanking at a gallop across the drawbridge and

over the moat? We don’t sanction his mandate to smite

the trackless steppes. We don’t want his blade banging
against the Tartar Gate, his muscular throat

bellowing the slogans of faith and certitude: Deus vult!

No God don’t. People’d say anything back then, angry
and delusional, prone to auto-da-fés

and the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg. Nowadays we nod
so logically, comfy in our algorithms

and siding with the chimps ever since Nietzsche wept

against the withers of a maltreated jade. Or, wagering
for God’s thumbs-up, the night Blaise Pascal

fudged the math. Poor Søren Kierkegaard! He tussled
with absentee seraphim and cherubim

as he stalked the streets of Copenhagen, boys chucking
snowballs at the inky plans for Christ stuffed

in his Scroogian top hat. We make snowmen only
so we can endure their melting, he might’ve but actually

never said. He’d be right, I’d imagine. But who knows?
Today God lives, they say, only in my brain’s

sludgy yeses and nos, where a no is no worse than a yes . . .

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Michael Derrick Hudson lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Boulevard, Columbia, Fugue, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and other journals. He was co-winner of the 2014 Manchester Poetry Prize.