Your Jesus Year

You’re busy.
Your eyes are leaking.

Your mouth is screwed up with realization: your folks are getting old and it’s
up to you to take care of them and you don’t know how and can’t afford it
anyway.

You’re in love with a pretty girl. Young and pretty.

This is not your Jesus year. There is no magic transformation around the
corner. You haven’t even figured out how you’ll die.

This is the year to float, shining like a dead star in the empyrean.
To kiss her mouth two hundred and twenty-four times and never again.
To heal the family wounds.
To burst.
To beckon.

Not everyone figures it out. How to look forward without looking ahead.

You’ll miss the end. Walking out to the garden of a Sunday afternoon.

I hope you play your trumpet and drums in the morning.
I hope your pretty girl makes a good memory for you.

I’m sure I see you, days later, arms full of plates, coming through the swinging
doors, smiling.

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Estelle Bajou is a French-American polymath. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in Variant Lit, Sheila-Na-Gig, Cathexis, Heavy Feather Review, Broad River Review, SoFloPoJo, Middlesex, The Abstract Elephant, The Closed Eye Open, and This Broken Shore. Her first poetry chapbook, I Never Learned to Pray, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in 2022. Raised in a furniture factory town in the North Carolina mountains, she now lives in New York City with a bunch of houseplants. Visit her at estellebajou.com.