Unremarkable as he was
I remember his wife
was on her third baby
of Biblical sobriquet
in as many years
and he was pulling out
his demerit book
because of a fifteen year old girl's
Old Navy shorts. Then our messiah,
whip-smart, tampon pulled out
of a pencil bag and cast across
the classroom like money changers’
tables in the temple courts
like a Pharisee trying to get in
to the kingdom of Heaven
and I said thank you Jesus
thank you for dying
so we could live
to see a grown man forget
to punish a girl for having legs
due to the irreverent revelation
of a swathed cylinder of cotton
leaping and genuflecting
before his lectern. But of course
this poem isn’t about tampons
or my mom making me
a truant on days they paraded
anti-Planned Parenthood pregnancy
propaganda or the columnist-
evangelist youth group leader decrying birth
control as “an abortion every day.”
Please God, not another
poem about falling out of feeling with the church
the bride of Christ, the only woman
I was ever trained to love.
More about my bewitching
bath tonight: salts, suds, goji
Tarocco orange. Between pages
of Ross Gay and the satin breaths of
ASMR, I feed myself pasta
salad, noodle by noodle
like old royalty, like new woman
like God herself incarnate.