1987

Let there be MTV. Let there be Prince. Let there be George. Let there be one final summer before an eternity of labor. Let there be Gap pastels and Chess King denim. Let there be beige plastic window units to cool sleep sofas in remote rooms of the house. Let the boys slip beneath chilled percale and electrify the dark. Let there be fatted calves over crumbling charcoal and bicycles with tumescent tires ready to outrun country mutts. Let there be chlorine-gilded hair and hotdog-warm skin under cobalt skies. For the church is empty, for every family has forsaken the pew for the park, the altar for the ocean. And the steep-sloped upper room of an only son will fill with new words and familiar fabric softener and beanbag chairs before black-and-white TV. Let the heavens be silenced for three days by a new wave of electric violins. Let the uncut yards well up with footprints and clotheslines and picnic tables ignored. Let every hymnal slam shut by the power of neglect. Let every pool glow in black light. Let torches illuminate the bare skin of the preruined in their warm bath beneath a pin-pricked navy night. Let the swell of summer be the envy of Satan. Let the alkaline baptism of the awakened tease every hair sprouting from their hills and valleys for the first time.

Jonathan Everitt is a Rochester-based freelance writer whose creative writing has been published or is forthcoming in Small Orange, The Bees Are Dead, The Empty Closet, Lake Affect, The Finger, ImageOutWrite, Escape into Life, The Upstate Gardener’s Journal, and is the basis for a short film. He has also co-led a workshop for LGBTQ poets and co-founded the monthly open mic, New Ground Poetry Night at Equal Grounds Coffeehouse in Rochester. Jonathan is currently a creative writing MFA candidate at Bennington College.