Luivette Resto

Your Mom’s Jesus


was his retort
when he felt
the impending loss of an argument
about arbitrary line breaks,
emphatic punctuation marks like the dash,
fantasy football team draft picks.

Where is the Messiah
when his father cannot silence
the symphony of aerial bombs
over Korea, Vietnam.

Where was Jesus
when his mother had breast cancer,
plaguing his middle school years
with nightmares of zombies
feasting on his mother’s carcass.

He developed road rage
counting all of the Jesus fish
plastered on the back of cars, trucks
and once, a tractor.

Weekly, he’d yank the metal Ichthys off cars
at mall parking structures,
bewildering Sunday school teachers
and catechism children.

Agnostic became his permanent status update,
highlighted on his dating profile,
tattooed over his heart in his mother’s handwriting.

Ampersand

 

Like the 27th letter of the alphabet
he was forgotten.
The way his thumb caressed her hand
when ferris wheels made her anxious,
twirled her in an embrace
as she carefully flipped blueberry pancakes.

He was misunderstood and misinterpreted
so she renamed him Mondegreen
for those private moments,
sitting in the solarium,
betting one another to see which rain drop
tumbled faster on the plated glass windows.

 

Luivette Resto was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico but proudly raised in the Bronx. In 2003, she completed her MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her first book of poetry, Unfinished Portrait, was published in 2008 by Tia Chucha Press and later named a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize. She is also a contributing poetry editor for the journal Kweli, a CantoMundo fellow, and the new hostess of a monthly poetry reading series called La Palabra located at Avenue 50 Studio in L.A.'s Higland Park.