Everybody Always Talking About Jesus
Everybody Always Talking About Jesus
I.
I got a girl up the attic
the summer I turned ten. Her shirt went damp
and we played a game where I’d strip and she’d slap
my calves with my dead grandma’s cane.
One afternoon she took my clothes
and left me up with the heat and dust, mothballs
fermenting like apples. I was nailed in.
She had lunch or baked bread, played nurse with her dolls
or something. I could hear my mother,
her vacuum scowl. I saw the sunlight snatch the shadows,
heard my father slam the door. After the third hour the girl rose
with my clothes and a switch from her yard.
I was so happy, I took it all; her arms sweating
like horses. My father and sister never knew
but in that house noise always dried like palm.
II.
Sis and I purge his boxes of books,
finding a faded Polaroid of a red-head
that was not my mother:
Garters cling to her thighs and her ass
is wide and rosy as if slapped
or left out in the December snow.
I guess I always knew my dad was not
a pious man. It’s sick, my sister says,
but my eyes stay on the woman,
recognizing her from the back row
of graduation and high school plays.
My sister sticks the photo between parched papers
and I think about dozens of times I saw the make
of dad’s car parked down side roads but never checked
the plates. I was the good boy. The one he wanted.
III.
I’m still up in the attic, going red with the girl,
the color of my hair lapsing. And I feel so naked
in Dad’s house with my sister, I walk around modest
like my balls are tucked into a loincloth. And, at night,
in the old house – the house he willed to her –
I keep thinking about Jesus, about all the talk
and how they all say to obey. We don’t know
if he was an alcoholic or kept a mistress. We don’t know
how badly he wanted to be on that cross. But the house,
I keep thinking, I could use that scratch. These days
Rosie wants pregnant so bad I barely touch her. So,
before Sis goes to bed I tell her, we can split everything –
Dad left me the car, you can have half the car. But no,
she says, the car’s seen too many stations
she doesn’t want to think about. She spits
her toothpaste and I watch
the light beneath her door
till it’s gone.
First published in Northwords Now (2008) and revised for Tomorrow, We Will Live Here, 2010.