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Eighth Grade
On Sundays we learn about the glorious mysteries.
I picture God as an impossibly large night-black bird, carrying the world in
His great beak like an iridescent bead.
A rooster showed up in our back yard one day, roosted in the trees.
Dad lets me help while he replaces the alternator on his ’77 Charger,
signs the permission slip from my Sunday school teacher before we start the unit about sex.
He plays Queen on the stereo in the garage.
They’re one of his favorites, even though Freddie was gay.
The rooster crows all day, not just mornings.
My teacher drones on: The Church considers homosexuality and masturbation sins of the flesh.
In gym class I change facing away from the other boys.
I try not to watch their athletic bodies.
At night, in my room, I try to remember what I could catch in my periphery.
I wear headphones to watch late-night HBO on the mini-TV on top of my dresser.
Through the screen, Father Tim prompts me: Any sins of the flesh?
After a year, a silent day. The rooster’s fox-eaten carcass splayed out in the grass.
I must confess, I still don’t know what good this body’s for.
Dad says we all have a story to write down, that life is like a story we tell by living it.
Dad loves Freddie because Freddie lived free.
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Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019), and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as residencies from the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Boston Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. ["Eighth Grade" appears in The Southern Review, Winter 2023.]
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Yasemen Asad, Freddie Mercury, mixed-media painting, 2022