I Teach Six-Year-Olds about Jesus
A girl I’ve never met meets me at the door,
whines at my leg until I hold her. Thin arms,
thin mouth, a sour smell I overlook while fetching
crayons, glue sticks, snacks. She lifts her dress,
exposes the top of her baggy white tights, looks at me.
We both sing: Faith is knowing the sun will rise.
I sit next to her, tap her hands, whisper no.
Kyle, on the front row, holds a cardboard
box on his lap, a green scrawl on the lid.
It’s his turn to toss the beanbag and recite
a miracle, but he stops, looks at me, says,
This is my box, like we must be introduced
before he can toss. He places it on the chair,
doesn’t know the miracle, returns it to his lap.
Michael sucks on the wings of his plastic bat, swings it so
I’m showered in spit. “What’s the bat’s name?”
I ask, taking two fingers to slow it. “Jesus.”
When I end the bat business, he howls and I hold
him like the Pieta, his sweaty back sticking to my arms.
I rock him, pray in his ear until he sleeps,
his tears soaking my blouse, his Jesus tucked in my bag.
Deja Earley works as the director of a library that serves rural Alabama, and lives in Auburn with her daughter and two cats. This poem was inspired by the weeks she taught the Sunbeams while on study abroad in London with BYU, and it appeared in her collection titled To the Mormon Newlyweds Who Thought the Bellybutton Was Somehow Involved, published by Signature Books in 2018. It also appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Dialogue and in the 2011 anthology Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets.
