By Joanne Dominique Dwyer

I’m walking in the forest with the mythic and shirtless Nazarene.
He juts out his chin, orienting me to birds in the sky.
He does not name them, but says Mira, they are inside you.
Next, he gestures toward the silver fish glinting in the stream,
     also nameless, incandescent, gilled.
He is wearing capri-length drawstring pants and prison crocs,
admonishes me not to trust experts.

I am looking for signs of scars on his back, when he staggers
and trips on a rusted can in the switchgrass.
He confides he is saddened priests have lost the proclivity
    for contemplating constellations and cultivating orchids.
Says how pathetic it is that he has seen priests sitting at slot machines
    chain-smoking, looking more like saturnine wax figures
than supraliminal men (at or above the threshold of consciousness).

Jesus senses my hearing is waning and moves closer to me.
Close enough that I feel strands of his hair brush against the bones
of my cheek and the lobes of my ear as he says, Most humans
are unaware that seed pods make a pact with the wind
to aid in the proliferation of beauty. And semantics relates
not only to semen, but to the spinning of hand-dyed yarn.

As I walk behind him, I stare at the contours of his sweat-luminous,
bark-colored calves as he climbs over barren boulders.
No one in their right mind should expect much
    from marriage to another human being, he adds.
Then, straightaway, we are standing in a grove
of chokecherry, the velocity of the wind is mounting;
    afternoon shadows are lengthening. 

Together, we ingest handfuls of wild cherries.
They look like oxblood marbles or the bloodshot eyes of martyrs.
    I’m getting cold in the high altitude.
I ask him how to safeguard against incessant rupture.
    Unhobble the horses and sing the old songs, he replies.
And how to forgive a priest?
He does not swivel his body to me, seems isolate.
A soundless blackout ensues.

And just before the dream extinguishes,
Jesus wipes the smudged mascara from the cage of my face—
angles his torso down like a four-legged animal
pawing the earth and unlaces my combat boots.
Then re-laces them tighter, as if to protect
    my ankles on the descent.

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Joanne Dominique Dwyer lives in Northern New Mexico where in addition to writing poetry, she is working on her first novel and riding her horse, Jaleh. Dwyer’s poems have been publishes widely, including twice in Best American Poetry. Her books are Rasa and Belle Laide.