Wednesday

 

It used to be on your forehead.

a blackened smudge

filtering through punctured skin,

entering the blood stream

until your cuts and scrapes became

Communion for forgotten sins

and you dripped the sermons

delivered in the precipices

of your childhood.

 

            Give us today our daily bread

                Forgive us our gluten intolerance

 

Like a bartender

who only serves

true crime podcast theories

or a stamp collector

who collects other stamp collectors,

habits reimagined

still ask you to bear the same weight.

 

Deliver us from temptation

Like a reverse Uber Eats

 

The smudge is still there,

bystanders can’t see it

nesting, in the coil of your

skull, calcified, waiting

to be exhumed and finally

rest behind glass or

stay dormant in the cave

surrendering to the moss,

never to be resurrected.

 

Jordan Hamel

 

 

Jordan Hamel is a Pōneke-based poet and performer. He was raised in Timaru on a diet of Catholicism and masculine emotional repression. He is the current New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and has words published or forthcoming in Takahē, Poetry NZ, Mimicry, Sweet Mammalian, Glass Poetry, Queen Mob’s Teahouse and elsewhere.