Beloved
by Jason Myers
Beloved shoulders of my beloved that give my hand a home.
Beloved seasons that teach us, in their delicious trickery, to wait, to expect, to call the
tunes that match the tones of the visible unclear.
Beloved Georgia O’Keefe’s brushes, each hair, each pigment, a praise, a prairie.
Beloved the artichoke, forbidding in her daggered leaves, undressed for a bath of
melted butter & lemon.
Beloved morning breath of the long married, & Netflix & chillers.
Beloved dawn with her vast palette, dusk with hers.
Beloved the plug of the tongue & the socket of the tongue & the current electric.
Beloved the hair that consecrates nipple, cock, vulva.
Beloved the eyes of the man walking down San Jacinto in a t-shirt I can’t read.
Beloved the hands of the woman pushing a cart along Cesar Chavez.
Beloved cows hunched upon hills, unaware their names are Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner.
Beloved teachers of languages & teachers of music & teachers of chemistry.
Beloved students huddled over iPhones & Oreos.
Beloved sorcery of morel, whispering to the attentive, hear ye hear ye.
Beloved gauze that says to blood, there there.
Beloved the bullets that spell America.
Beloved the bellies of words, scratched to ecstasy.
Beloved the temple of the watermelon, dripping stained glass.
Beloved prisoners of war, survivors of gruel & misappropriation.
Beloved varieties of pepper, the sauces they hot.
Beloved Lester Young who bewitched a reed, his tongue, his breath, his modus vivendi a
benediction that made of the saxophone a sanctuary.
Beloved the clerk at Montgomery Ward who sold my childhood friends their bikes
that they could race me down the streets of suburban Maryland.
Beloved the children who manufactured these bikes.
Beloved the children of John Keats & all poets who died with poems their only progeny.
Beloved the prophets of Israel, & Africa, & America, whose words lash & promise.
Beloved my stupid little head that tries to fit & fit & fit but is still so, so empty.
Beloved the trees I cannot see because they’ve been consumed in fire, the trees that
hung bodies like laundry, the trees that will be planted tomorrow & tomorrow
& especially trees that take their tiny fingers, & count & count & count until
all of a sudden, we’re rich with persimmons!
Beloved the prayers of those too tired to pray, too abused, too smart, too wealthy,
beloved the body that knows that everything, every single fucking thing,
is a prayer to whose blue god wouldn’t you like to know?
Jason Myers is Editor-in-Chief of EcoTheo Review. His work has appeared in The Believer, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. A National Poetry Series finalist, he lives with his family outside Austin, Texas.
