This is what I want —
an invocation or a memory
untainted by ’60s Methodist
abstract stained glass or
having been kissed
in the church kitchen,
an old man’s sweaty cheek
smearing my glasses.
I want tiny cups of grape juice,
dusty sighs and offertory envelopes,
paper bulletins and golf pencils
to draw on them. Do I want
’80s Jesus to come back,
those days to come back, only
this time I would yell
for my mother, in the next room,
decorating long tables
for Easter dinner? I didn’t yell —
I went out to the playground,
sat on the jungle gym, thought
how everything had changed.
And it had.
The skyscraper church
in downtown Chicago —
far from Dayton, Ohio —
rings out the doxology,
Wesley hymns, and I’m sorry
to be separated from my music,
startled when I know all the words.
Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia 
Spacing is weird because I wrote this on my phone. Will edit it when I can!
This is so moving, Marilyn. (And I wish “’80s Jesus” would come back and sock that guy in the face.)
Thank you! The man is dead now, so maybe ’80s Jesus or some other force has meted out justice. It wasn’t just this incident, by the way, and it wasn’t just me. A predator used his position as husband of the children’s choir director for at least several years.
Ugh. Sickening that he got away with this for so long.