i left god
by Shy-Zahir Moses

---

Shy-Zahir Moses (they/them) is a Black person, poet, and educator working on a way to make it out of Texas. A Best New Poets (2025) nominee and graduate of the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, Shy’s work has appeared in Muzzle Magazine, Torch Magazine, and Callaloo, among others. Their poetry attempts to reckon with the absurdity of C-PTSD, the fallibility of language, and the practice of remembering/misremembering, whatever that means. Shy is a lover of many things: Magnolia trees, Solange, horror movies, fine point pens, screaming, and being alive. They are who they say they are.