J. NEIL C. GARCIA 
PARDON

Candles humming at the altar of my Lola’s
Lord of Pardon, a dim bottle of coconut oil
below the stool on which the bleeding Jesus sat,
his dark and heavy head crowned by metal thorns
and tilting slightly left and down, his sad face
lit with huge and glassy eyes, teeth
showing through the parted lips,
right cheek broken pink and black and
trickling quietly, like the rest of him,
with thickly painted blood. I was seven and
loved my Lola. She murmured her beads in quick
and purling words every evening at the Lord
who pardoned even those who hit him,
scourged him, spat at him, turned him into
this kind and life-size statue of himself,
Lord of a Hundred Wounds, arms resting
in his bruised lap, his back straight and unmoving,
its skin whiplashed all over with streaks of mud
about to dry. Crossing herself, my Lola touched his feet,
and I sat beside her as she prayed to him,
who could make a person well if she bore
her suffering in silence for his sake, and rubbed
her sickness away with oil turned special
by his tired and holy weight. Following her hand,
I rubbed it on my Lola’s stomach which was sick,
and which made her sick, its nameless pain swelling
her legs and turning her eyes and wrinkled skin
a pale and waxy yellow. Away at the hospital, she lay
asleep for a week, and I came to the Lord of Pardon
in the night, and slipped her beads between my fingers,
and there in the darkness stood Tito Jun,
whom Nanay left to watch over me while she
and Ate fluttered around Lola’s sleep
and shallow breathing.Tito Jun looked at me,
his eyes burning soft with candle-light,
he said, Come here Joaquin, I’ll show you
something good, and so I went. Shy and full
of prayer inside my tightened mouth I walked to him
and I could see him holding something black
and hard inside his hand, black and hard and sticking
out of him through his rough and unzipped pants.
Before I could turn away, his hands took
me by my shoulders and twisted me
around to face the altar, he pushed me closer
to the Lord and reached out under him for the oil,
for my Lola’s almost empty bottle, uncapped it,
and then he pulled my shorts down to my knees,
and pressed the weight of an arm down my back, till I
was bent over and forward. I looked up at him,
my Lola’s bleeding Jesus as well as mine, as the pain
of a nail or stick hammered deep into me, as a hand
kept my mouth from saying nothing, for this was how,
I knew, it was to suffer and to pardon,
how to make my Lola well. His big and lovely eyes
looked down at me, as Tito Jun’s breath pitched and
dug behind my self, and my eyes were wet and my back
turned stiff with every sharp and piercing throb.
All around me the air sweetened and hummed with
coconut-smell, cooking to a slow and sticky brown,
the way my fingers and my Lola’s skin would smell
every time I rubbed upon it drops
of the forgiving Lord’s warm and gleaming love.
 
 
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