On a June Sunday
a jam session
sets up
outside the
Church of the Immaculate Conception
on Elder Street.

Maggie
stubs her Djarum butts
on the lines
of her gospel.
JoJo
comes with his guitar,
needles Jesus direct
with no desire
to choke down
white bread.
Gabriel
burps his horn
and fruit bursts
from the limbs of the Bare Tree.

And Mickie
on the battered snare
holds herself tall and bold
even as she ducks out for a moment
to enter
the tomb and see
for herself
what the Madonna’s
come to at last.

Up front
the Virgin’s
downturned face
shines.

“Did you know,”
says Mickie to Mary,
“that your storied Inside
is just our Outside
that’s been approved and gilded?
It may have all happened a legend ago,
but it’s still a fact.

We’re not that
different. I could have been
you, could have let God
clasp me tight —

but the way Maggie smokes and
shouts, the communion
JoJo lets play on his face,
righteous Gabriel thinking
every hymn’s a gas
to be ignited:

how could I come in
from that hothouse
and love this too-clean cold?

Do you recognize
me, your sister, a fellow
virgin paroled by jazz
and smack? Is it too much for you to say
that the Outside is what makes
the Inside?

That Baby you had —
you gave Him up, let go
too soon because
something called you. We know
how that feels better
than almost anyone in here

except, maybe, for that former girl
in the back pew
who keeps turning her head
toward the door
and tapping her foot.”

Once she’s back Outside,
Mickie matches
JoJo run for run, and Maggie
belts a pulse across
Gabby’s fanfares.

The girl
who was once inside comes
out at the end of the service
then walks home
thinking of the shattered handcuffs
painted
on the shell of Mickie’s drum.