Rachel Custer

The Methodist Preacher’s Son Reads Jesus’ Son

There’s a ruined church in the woods where we get high. The cross has fallen crooked on the wall. Still the wooden Jesus looks at us. Nobody wants to move it – take it where? So we nod out beneath the gaze of God. Some day I’ll wake up to the real thing, I suppose. I can only imagine His eyes like my father’s eyes. No matter what he believes, he’s not the reason I use. Just like I’m not the reason he loves. My drugs are just as much a drug for him. He’d never admit it, even to himself: he loves me sick. One time I swore that Jesus winked at me. That was the night Tressie almost died. We gotta get that cross out of here, I told whoever was there. I was too high to even see. There’s a kind of love that only loves the broken. It will break you over and over to make itself. I want to believe my father really cares. If I wasn’t dying of something shameful, I mean. What an offering he is blessed to bring. To forgive a son, to love a son, despite.

Rachel Custer

Rachel Custer the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, One Art, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com.