Poem of the Week | December 15, 2025

“The God of Kindness” by Matt McBride is our Poem of the Week.

Matt McBride is the author of two full-length collections, City of Incandescent Light (Black Lawrence, 2018) and At the Mercy of the Flies (Half Mystic, 2026), as well as four chapbooks. His most recent, Prerecorded Weather, cowritten with Noah Falck, is available from Survision Books. He is the winner of the James Tate Prize, the St. Lawrence Book Award, and the Ohio Chapbook Award. He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant, an Elliston Poetry Fellowship, and a Writers in the Heartland residency. He lives in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing for Wilson College. He can be found online at mattmcbridepoetry.com.

The God of Kindness

–after Mark Wunderlich’s “The God of Nothingness” and dedicated to the staff of Paramount Senior Living Facility, Chambersburg Road

She was losing five pounds a week,
lay rumpled in her wheelchair
as nurse aides begged her to eat.
She couldn’t explain what she felt (or didn’t) anymore.
The tail of a frayed neuron
had caught on one of her memories,
and as her brain spun,
it untangled like a crochet blanket
coming apart in the wash.
Offered anything she wanted for dinner,
what did this 73-year-old dementia patient say?
Mashed potatoes from KFC
(the social worker later told me).
So an aide, unnamed in her own story,
drove 20 minutes, each way,
to the nearest franchise.
I wasn’t there, but I can tell you
the gasoline in her car was the blood
of the god of kindness.
That unnamed aide paid her own money
to place before my mother
the mashed potatoes in their plastic frisbee.
Mom’s response as they cooled and crusted
on the imitation wood tray?
Throw them away.
You’d think the god of kindness is weightless:
a cabbage moth, fluttering
through the empty orbits of a skull.
But I’ll tell you that’s not true.
The god of kindness is heavy,
dense as a collapsed star—
the head of a pin
eight billion angels dance upon.

Author’s Note

I moved my mother to a skilled nursing facility in the summer of 2023. It was strange watching the staff form bonds with her. They knew mom intimately, saw her in moments of vulnerability I never would, yet I rarely knew their names. Around this time, I read Mark Wunderlich’s devasting poem. I was awed by his depiction of brain cancer as a malevolent god watching his father. I wanted to try something similar, hoping it’d be a way to approach my own experiences. However, I didn’t want to mirror Wunderlich. While the god of nothingness was a cold, dog-faced god, I wanted to imagine the god watching mom as something else. Then, Henry, the facility’s social worker, told me the story that became this poem.