Jesse Millner

Prayer

after Cheryl Pappas

The time he fell off the teeter totter in second grade, the time he looked at the bra ladies in the Sears catalog in the outhouse, the time he ate so many winesap apples from his grandma’s tree he got diarrhea, the time his grandma took him out into the front yard and showed him the Big and Little Dippers, the time he got impetigo, the time his grandma referred to a black woman in a way that confused him, the time he was old enough to read the whites only sign at the gas station water fountain, the time he watched Watts burn on TV, the time he rode on a Greyhound through Alabama at night and noticed the black folks sitting in the back, the time he learned about body counts in Vietnam, the time he saw Buddhist priests burn themselves alive on the nightly news, the time he saw the first man land on the moon, the time he fell in love with a tall blond girl who never even realized he was alive, the time his friend Tom explained to him what falsies were, the time he went to a dance at the school gym and became intoxicated from a girl’s White Rained hair, the time his grandfather got drunk, the time his grandfather got drunk, the time his grandfather got drunk, the time he heard a bobcat screaming in the night woods, the time his dad didn’t explain to him the whole deal with sex, the time he got a hard-on while giving an oral report in front of class, the time he realized that his penis just did what it wanted, the time he realized he no longer believed in God, the time he learned to play baseball, the time his little brother wound him up in a tire swing and unleashed him, the time he heard The Beatles, the time he drank beer for the first time, the time he drank beer for the first time at Silver Springs, the time he went swimming drunk in cold water, the time he thought about giving up and floating down toward the waving grasses below, the time he held a girl’s hand and shivered in a good way, the time the kids at school called him a spaz, the time the kids at school called him a spaz, the time his high school football coach called him a spaz, the time he sat in his room and cried, the time he sat in his room and thought about killing himself, the time he kissed a girl, the time he kissed a girl by an apartment swimming pool, the time he fell in love, the time he bought a girl a jade bracelet from a headshop, the time he ate pot brownies, the time he smoked pot in the morning and watched Sesame Street, the time he almost flunked out of college, the time he got married, the time he and his wife fought, the time his wife hit him, the time his wife tried to yank the steering wheel out of his hands and wreck their Buick Skylark, the time they made love drunk, the time they went camping and forgot the tent, the time they kissed in the pouring rain, the time they received the eviction notice, the time the wife slept with his best friend, the time Mount St. Helens exploded, the time the Challenger crashed into the Atlantic, the time he got so drunk he peed in his pants, the time he got so drunk he thought White Castle cheeseburgers were tasty, the time he wrecked his car by driving it into the side of the garage, the time he drove his car without brakes, the time he drove off Lake Shore Drive into a muddy softball field in Grant Park, the time he got drunk and tried to kill himself, the time he got drunk and tried to kill himself, the times he woke up pissed off he was still alive, the times he walked through the endless cold rain in Chicago in early December, the time at bars filled with smoke, the time at bars when he thought he loved the men he was drinking with, the time he looked into the mirror behind the bar and hated the man who looked back, the time he tried carbon monoxide, the time he tried Xanax and bourbon, the time he almost died when he was not trying to kill himself, the time his friends began disappearing, the time he drank at home alone and hated himself, the time he drank at home alone after his wife left him, the time he drank at home alone and started calling old girlfriends late at night when he was so sad he knew they would save him, the time one of them told him to fuck off and it hurt so much he loved it more than anything he’d loved before, the time he was ashamed, the time he was ashamed, the time he ended up at the Blarney Stone on Lincoln Avenue and tried to fight with a man, the time he was thrown out on the sidewalk by a pissed-off bartender, the time his knees bled from his torn blue jeans, the time the shamrock in the bar window blazed greenly into the night, the time it started to snow, the time the flakes fell down softly on his face, the time the whole world became a hushed room where everything—streets, parking meters, black tree branches, two flats, cars—blended into and disappeared into the storm, the time he prayed, the time he prayed, the time he prayed desperately to the night sky and invisible stars.

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Jesse Millner wishes he had been raised in a remote village in Ecuador, close to the Amazon, by indigenous people who just know why this plant, when ground up and mixed with that plant, would yield a concoction that reveals the true meaning of our human lives and beyond.