The Great Ohio Desert

My father, an ex altar boy, taught me

to play ball on Sunday mornings

basketball court tucked beside city pool

in a vast pasture dotted with cows, 

occasional cars on narrow ribbons of road.

Afterwards a dozen donuts from Kennedy’s

glaze dissolving on my tongue. 

Billboards painted on barns

advertised God’s wrath. Or maybe

His grace? To me they looked the same.

And The Lion’s Den Adult Bookstore.

And The Living Word. 

As the literature of the upper air

fought for my soul, I drove

to Swan’s Sports Shop for new

high tops. The numbers didn’t lie:

teen pregnancy capital of the state,

alarming dropout rate: 

it didn’t seem like Jesus 

was winning Guernsey county.

Driving the dirt roads out 

to the McConnelsville gymnasium, 

I looked out at Jesus’s face carved

in the high-up hillside. Very handsome,

I thought. He asked me

to pray with him. I prayed

to grow another six inches.

I prayed for a Dr. Pepper.

I prayed an empty space

for everything I didn’t know

to ask for, to get me out of there. 

I slept alone beneath the basket

the net my blanket

shot through with holes

awoke to find someone wrote 

HOPE on the back of one

backboard, wrote SACRIFICE

across the other in chalk.

Jefferson Navicky is a poet, writer, and archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection. He think it's important for men to write about the failures of their bodies.