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.