JONATHAN EVERITT - POEMS

​Jonathan Everitt is a Rochester, N.Y., freelance writer whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in BlazeVox, Small Orange, Impossible Archetype, Ghost City Press, The Bees Are Dead, and ImageOutWrite, among other journals. He is currently a creative writing MFA candidate at Bennington College. 

A ghost visits his birth hospital 
​

​You’d expect a specter to haunt by pewter moonlight.
Yet today I roam the September sunlit halls of what remains. 
 
Six brick stories. A hundred thousand stories more within,
so much smoldering antiseptic smoke escaping holes
 
where windows and doors once latched.
Ivy and spiders where nurses once made rounds.
 
Late summer light radiates through wrecked angles into silent corridors.
Rusted wheelchair. Water fountain. Shred of curtain beaten by breeze.
 
Amid the ruin, an empty nursery where
chattering family and church folk would
 
wave and coo to unaware newborns as they wailed alive.
Rows of bassinets now cracked, in shadow, lined up like a lost little infantry.
 
I am the only ghost here. 
Still, through broken rafters comes the hum of a familiar lullaby.
 
A flock erupts into cracks of sky.

 

The upper room
​

​Some inner sanctums waft with mildewed pews and
bittersweet phosphorous of spoiled rose perfume.
 
But here, the fabric softener blooms from
freshly laundered corduroy and Fruit of the Loom.
 
Five-drawered dresser stuffed with size 10
socks; shelf ablaze with Judy Blume.
 
The chamber’s papered walls peel back from plaster,
sloughing like the skin of a long-gone resident whose
 
god died, too—maybe buried in the backyard garden
beside other rodents someone loved enough to name.
 
A toy box entombs creatures that await the
son’s return, but he isn’t coming back for them, not soon.
 
Instead, his stereo sings praise to adolescent idolatry,
its abominable Madonna knows exactly what to coo.

 

Messiah
​

​After a sculpture by Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse’s Le Messie 
And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.
                                                                                                                          Genesis 22:6-8
 

​I.
Albert, it’s winter in a many-mansioned house in Massachusetts
as I meander room to room past precious art,
each pair of double doors pinned open, mummified
wings to tombs dressed in flowers, faces, cathedrals,
rituals of the living and the dead.
Amid the collection, a maquette of your Messiah—the same one whose
full marble grandeur punctuates a Paris church.
But here and now, its cold illumination pierces only me.
 
II.
A mother, seated, draped in robes,
bows her head and lifts an infant over her head.
I think she may be merely one of countless Marys
who’ve offered up their innocent babes to heaven--
to the church and all its promises and threats.
Even now, the boy’s head hangs, his arms uncurl,
his feet like two pups huddling, awaiting a Roman spike.
No child chooses such surrender, such
sacrifice—tossed in a volcano to spare the crops.
 
III.
The mother, so somber, the soft egg of the boy’s head, so round--
Albert, you touched your tools to his tiny mouth,
made him from the clay and stone, never intending to
breathe life into him. And did you imagine what a boy king
might know of his own fate? How the weight of the world could
come to rest upon such helpless shoulders, themselves captive
to a mother’s muscled hands?
 
IV.
Show me something new: a mother releasing her son
not to empty sky, but to a cradle in a nursery of soft quilts,
music boxes, crackers and milk. She tucks her baby in, then
retires to a rocking chair beside a window
to hum a lullaby undisturbed by all the ancient stars
beyond the glass, or by the barren, distant moon, its marble
light an illusion of radiance.
All the while, her child’s sparrow-tender breaths keep time.
No crown of thorns will ever perforate his head.

 

The naming of the animals
​

​And on the eighth day, Adam
died, and there was no one left
who remembered the animals’
names. And so I wandered
the wilderness far from Eden,
over low dunes and wet meadows,
woodlands alive with wordless song,
seashores bursting with grey arcs
of anonymous fish. And as I wandered,
I pulled from my little satchel
a pencil and a blank spiral book,
pointed to each creature, each monster,
each stalk and vine, and spoke their names
into existence, though there was no
witness to this new sacrament but me,
the only man,
with all my ribs and
beating heart beneath
the only god,
the only serpent,
the only living word
in all the earth.