Jesus is His Son but We’re all God’s Children, or In Which an Exchange Student From Heaven Stays with You for A Weekend

Jesus is His Son but We’re all God’s Children, or In Which an Exchange Student From Heaven Stays with You for a Weekend

On Saturday you watch a boy dull his mouth

     into a fist. He gifts you the things he cannot keep: a

child-sized diabolo, locks of his hair, the love he has

for his mother. A jagged grasp of memory abandons you every time–

     during that summer you started crying and never stopped, in the canyon

blessed by God’s fury, over a dull cellular connection,

on the precipice of saying goodbye. Not quite there but

     almost. It is a two-way performance, and He is the only man

you will ever learn to love. Was it the blood on your hands,

or the blood on your underwear that made you my daughter?

     your Father asks later, amused. What he doesn’t learn can’t

hurt him, and what he doesn’t know is that it was neither,

but the blood on your teeth & the way the girl

     cried corroded red when you chose not to kiss her back.

That the blood wasn’t yours, but it could have been.

That you’re not what he thinks you are, but you

     could have been. On Sunday He presses His palm into

your inner thigh bone, hot as a branding iron but only a

nickel as painful; you’d know. You’ve felt the claim of a man

     before, and He’s not a man, He’s on his way to becoming

something else. And you let Him, because you know what

it’s like to stop being soft. How teeth can’t regrow more than

     once. How a mouth can bleed open and open from unripened arils,

that oxygen-sucked July He stopped talking only to relearn speech

this time through fists instead of words. How a men’s shaver

     isn’t that different from a razor’s bite when it’s held by someone

who loves you more than you will Ever Be Able To Comprehend,

or so He says. On Monday You are perched on the canyon,

     taking turns throwing rocks into God’s mouth. Let’s play that

fucked-up game, He says. A version of the Trolley Dilemma

that neither of you is able to let go of. This is a story about Him,

     not you, but you still peel pomegranates together– weblike rind muting

your incisors, crimson juice a sharp arc carving across flushed skin.

A whistle, trilling & endless. He smiles, touches your mouth

     without any metallic aftertaste; this is how you know the grave

will be empty, only minuscule crooked seeds at the corners—

Okay, how about Our Lord Who Art in Heaven?

you half-joke. It depends, He replies, On whether he is on the

side of the tracks for which I have to flip a lever or not