I met Jesus in Bushwick

By Brittany Adames

On the modular couch, the fingers splays

against the curve of a collarbone, television

flickers in a measured motion. We have

miraculously invented the clatter, the

performance and the self-rule, the ghost

of a pot that hasn’t hit the stove

quite yet. I wish sadness stayed in

the place you left it. How does it feel

to be big? This is not mechanical. Every

groove in this bloodless body is a syllable

to be lauded, at least once. What I mean is

that even when everything’s godless the air

itself seems to take the form of something

that I would know as beautiful. I like how

you say my name. Like a grievance. Like a

wetness that never sticks. The chickens in cages

only know deftness from a blade to the throat.

Here is where we catalogue danger: the peeling

of the tooth, the stovetop kettle steaming in a

way that almost feels real, the manner of half-

truths, the bed testifying to its own undoing,

the gringo spitting into the dirt, the plantain

mashed by the pestle, the kiss—mi dios— the kiss, the

orchids themselves making color

out of chaos. Back in the Dominican Republic, our

palms greened by the crack of the limoncillo,

my father belts out into song and for a moment,

I can look him in the eye again. That’s the way to do it.

To recalibrate language one has to sugar it first. To-

ngue it. Let me know how it tastes, how it roves,

how it smoothes. It tastes sweet, doesn’t it? The

reckoning comes first, then. The bloodshed, then

the loving of a woman, a disappearing myth, my

mother asking which man am I devouring now?

I pray the urgency makes itself known. I pray for

estrange. The possibility beyond death, beyond

the ongoing body, beyond your hair wound

around my finger, the intent hang of lips.

This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 17.

Photo by Nelson Ndongala