When I Say Jesus Was My Boyfriend

I don’t mean that I snuck out my bedroom window,vaulting over juniper bushes to get to his carwhich he’d bought by working summers and weekendsat the Trujillos’ Broken Moon ranch,tractoring the fields, hauling bales,and turning a red so deepit gives up into brown,    nor do I mean

he’d drive me through the early winter nightto the lonesome mesa and turn off the engine,sitting still for a nervous moment before leaning into French my face, his eager tonguea newborn calf struggling its wayto milk, his hand searching my shirt and,when finding form, cupping my breast, notwith lust so much as reverence,a jeweler staring through a loupeat a gem rumored and finally realized,the radio playing an R&B song filledwith harmonies and breakdowns and, at one point, talking, a testimony, the deep voice pledgingto do better, be better, love harder,if given the chance.    When I say Jesus was my boyfriend

I mean only that I talked about himto all my friends and did the thingsI thought he’d like because I knewhe loved me but mostly in the waywe know at fifteen that everyone we lovewill someday be dead, and we will be dead,and an army flying some future flagwill build an outpost on what was once the mallwhere our parents dropped us offto hang out with our friendsexcept that no one else shows and soit’s just us drinking an Orange Juliusand trying to look indifferentto loneliness, which is to saythis certainty was theoretical and I wasn’t sureof anything, so I gave my body to the river,wore white because I was his.    When I say

Jesus was my boyfriend what I meanwas that he told me he loved meeven though I didn’t deserve it,that it was a gift I had to repaywith my one stupid lifeand that I should wait for him.    And I did, and I am, still

waiting, not for him to descendfrom a sky in which clouds have formedthe 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 moreand I watched them go and suddenlyhe went too, the cross of clouds collapsinginto nothingness, and I was still there, stillearthbound, untaken, and so this wasn’ta dream so much as it wasdamnation, to have seen pure happiness comebut not for me, so I am not waiting for himbut for that feeling, the someone-would-do-anything-for-youfeeling, 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, notin some rumored after and notfrom a ghost. And all I get is regular love,which doesn’t even ask anymorehow it is I like my eggs, and so maybeI don’t deserve even this milk love, its expiration datestamped along the seams, this love that makeslistening sounds while staring off intoa thicket of its own desires, only halfin where it is and half where it wantsyet to be. But why should lovebe any more resilient than the bodies we do this loving with? Why shouldn’tlove flab and crease, spot and sag,developing a weird but specific smell?And I keep wanting loveto 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 bedwhile love works nights in a factory that manufacturesforgiveness, meeting the ceaseless demand,bringing the seconds home to me.I gave birth onceand there was so much blood,in the pain I punched a...