Two Poems

I Found Jesus on a Billboard

Driving North on 95 my eyes were
nystagmic and numbness shot from
the tips of my fingers in South Carolina
all the way home to West Virginia.

Forty-eight-foot-wide bulletin selling God:
Worried? Jesus offers security.
There he was, palms outstretched, mighty supplicant!

I unclenched my jaw and saw my skin was not so scaly as
the night before—the lines of my hair not so sharp now.
Prayer can be turned over
and inspected again rather than
prated and pounded, in and in and in.

I thought about Father David in his waist-high waders,
cradling the back of my head
pinching my nose and plunging me—
the chlorine water didn’t smell like it had anything to do with Jesus.

I thought about the puckered Baptist spectators with hand fans,
beads of sweat cascading away from silver hairlines.
I thought about the Sunday School teacher
who hugged me when I came out sopping,
I thought about the dark circle my dripping hair made on her
holy bosom.

The congregation of tail-lights in front of me flashed Amen.

When I rolled the window down
the smell of burnt rubber filled the Civic—
crisp air lapping my face and pushing my hair back reminded me
I hadn’t slept in a couple days, and I smelled bad.

◊

Consider Yourself a Crack

Feel the intimacies of this solid
station compromised by a fraction
of the weight given—
a very large man has stood here.
You’re looking up
from between two tall walls 

and witnessing a sky
given way to shadow-
less ground. 

You are not capable.
You are widened by water’s freezing.
You are tickled by ants crawling through your body’s boundaries. 

Feel the bumps
of bicycle tires,
be baked by unfiltered
sun, be drowned
by rain that will drain and seep
and reveal the earth
beneath your jagged forms. 

Feel transient, dancing feet. 

Consider yourself small;
consider yourself given up on;
consider violence.