Freezer Jesus

The Christians, they say Jesus is coming;
he’ll rise from the dead and among us he’ll walk.
He’s not coming again, for y’see,
he already came that second time.
But he didn’t do much walking
though he talked a hell of a lot.

I come home one night to find my Mae
shivering in the kitchen,
saying she would not, could not get
the meat from the freezer chest.
So I stomped down to our basement
to lift up the lid,
but before I could grip the handle
a voice whispered, “Blessed be thou.”
“Mae, is this some kinda joke?”
She said nothing, hovering at the top of the stairs
like a middle-aged moth in pink curlers.

Now on that cover was a bit of mildew
shaped in a kind of a face.
I poked it.
“Ouch!” it gasped, turning the other cheek.
My eyes met the watery blue of Mae’s before returning
to Our Savior of the Frigidaire.
“I told you it was spooky.”

But my stomach was growling,
so I slammed the top against the wall
– against muffled protest –
and got my meat.
When I closed the freezer, a pair of mildewey eyes
gazed mournfully into mine from the crud;
“Blessed be thou.”
“SHUT UP!” echoed from the steps.

That night it started. The praying;
the up and down mutterings
dancing through our heads.
Those words we couldn’t quite hear
from our bed.
I spent half the night
smothered under the weight of my pillow,
the other, straining to catch his words.

For days we avoided the cellar,
trying hard not to hear
our scratched record, mumbling,
rumbling from below, broken
intermittently by pleas for belief.

Then the miracles;
heavy-lidded, we groaned to breakfast
only to find
all our taps and faucets
ran rusty, musty red wine.
And almost-stale loaves
covered all the counters and
some of the floors.
And much to my chagrin,
the shower and bathtub were filled
with fish after fish:
yellow-eyed, rainbow-finned trout.

Finally, Mae couldn’t handle anymore;
a week after he appeared, bleary,
teary-eyed and contrite,
she met me at the door
still holding the bottle of Soft Scrub.

“Tom, look what I’ve done.”
I smiled and said,
“Thank God.”
She clutched my arm with nails
chipped and rusty brown; “But Tom,”
her damp face
turned up to me,
“What if?”

So I quit my job and built this,
our shrine to the Freezer Jesus;
after all,
it’s our everlasting souls.

And here we sit and wait for
Apocalypse, Armageddon,
the end of the supermarket strip mall
and pray in our freezer home.