Two poems by Jonathan Fletcher
"How Catholic Are Even My Genes!" and "Fall"
How Catholic Are Even My Genes!
Into my mouth the wafer goes
once or twice a year—Midnight Mass
and Easter. Into a bolus
the wafer forms by teeth and tongue.
Into my stomach the bolus
turns to chyme through acid and enzymes.
Into my small intestine
the chyme mixes with digestive juices.
Into the walls, nutrients absorb,
into the bloodstream, water.
Into my large intestine, the rest turns into stool.
Would that I could get the Catholic
out of me, too! But my guilt is veiny, cellular,
my double helices, cruciform.
Try as I might, I can’t help but regret
that I won’t pass it down.
Fall
Instead of gifting rib,
I wish He’d hardened your hip.
I wish there’d been more bone.
I’d wish there’d been more you.
Bone to bone, bone to dust.
If Ezekiel could speak to bone,
lock bone with bone, layer white with red,
red with pink, then why not me?
Without spirit, what good’s a skeleton?
Atop a grassy plot of bones-to-be,
I kneel and whisper to you, my joint.
Over the years, I became yours, too.
You lost bone; I grew and grew.
Had I only been there for the fall!
About the Poet:
Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025. Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.
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