I don’t mean that I snuck out my bedroom window,
vaulting over juniper bushes to get to his car
which he’d bought by working summers and weekends
at the Trujillos’ Broken Moon ranch,
tractoring the fields, hauling bales,
and turning a red so deep
it gives up into brown,
nor do I mean
he’d drive me through the early winter night
to the lonesome mesa and turn off the engine,
sitting still for a nervous moment before leaning in
to French my face, his eager tongue
a newborn calf struggling its way
to milk, his hand searching my shirt and,
when finding form, cupping my breast, not
with lust so much as reverence,
a jeweler staring through a loupe
at a gem rumored and finally realized,
the radio playing an R&B song filled
with harmonies and breakdowns and, at one point,
talking, a testimony, the deep voice pledging
to do better, be better, love harder,
if given the chance.
When I say Jesus was my boyfriend
I mean only that I talked about him
to all my friends and did the things
I thought he’d like because I knew
he loved me but mostly in the way
we know at fifteen that everyone we love
will someday be dead, and we will be dead,
and an army flying some future flag
will build an outpost on what was once the mall
where our parents dropped us off
to hang out with our friends
except that no one else shows and so
it’s just us drinking an Orange Julius
and trying to look indifferent
to loneliness, which is to say
this certainty was theoretical and I wasn’t sure
of anything, so I gave my body to the river,
wore white because I was his.
When I say
Jesus was my boyfriend what I mean
was that he told me he loved me
even though I didn’t deserve it,
that it was a gift I had to repay
with my one stupid life
and that I should wait for him.
And I did, and I am, still
waiting, not for him to descend
from a sky in which clouds have formed
the shape of a cross, which is a real dream I once had,
him bursting golden in the blue over my church,
my family and friends rising to meet him,
first a few and then more
and I watched them go and suddenly
he went too, the cross of clouds collapsing
into nothingness, and I was still there, still
earthbound, untaken, and so this wasn’t
a dream so much as it was
damnation, to have seen pure happiness come
but not for me, so I am not waiting for him
but for that feeling, the someone-would-do-anything-for-you
feeling, would-die-a-sandal-wearing-virgin-
because-it’s-him-or-you feeling,
and I think that maybe this
is what has ruined me the most,
that I want such love now, not
in some rumored after and not
from a ghost. And all I get is regular love,
which doesn’t even ask anymore
how it is I like my eggs, and so maybe
I don’t deserve even this milk love, its expiration date
stamped along the seams, this love that makes
listening sounds while staring off into
a thicket of its own desires, only half
in where it is and half where it wants
yet to be. But why should love
be any more resilient than the bodies
we do this loving with? Why shouldn’t
love flab and crease, spot and sag,
developing a weird but specific smell?
And I keep wanting love
to be kinder to me, but perhaps it is that I
have not been kind to love,
not understanding, not patient enough to warm my own bed
while love works nights in a factory that manufactures
forgiveness, meeting the ceaseless demand,
bringing the seconds home to me.
I gave birth once
and there was so much blood,
in the pain I punched a wall, the fist
mark left hanging like an angry moon,
so I think it’s no big thing to bleed for love,
no miracle in being breakable.
When I say Jesus was my boyfriend
I mean he died when the car he drove
crossed over the solid line, that he’s been married
twice and has his real estate license,
that he would look me up but has forgotten
my last name. I mean he said what he needed
to say. I mean that some days,
when I see a group of girls, tinged golden
from chosenness, whisper curated confessions
they release like doves into the air,
I miss him. I miss him and do not tell
my husband, do not tell my friends.
I carry the secret of missing him
in my grown and tired body
until the world nudges a new horror forward
and I need the space he’s in.
I offer my good hands.
I save what I can save.
__________________________________
From the forthcoming spring issue of The Sewanee Review.
