I am the same boy
in the morning
who looks into the rolling boil.
Eggs buoying
in a saucepan, I whisper
the Padre Nuestro
three times, as the they dance
to a soft running
yolk. My phone
lights up beside
the cutting board,
a text from a coworker—
her sick husband in rehab—
writes, our God is
a great God. The words
I pocket in my slacks,
repeat to myself to feel
how they poke
perforations in my head
like fork tines through oil
coagulated at the top
of a mason jar. How fitting
the absence that just appears
in a life—a child opens
the heart to the divine
in the same way
we fluff a pillow
for a perished partner—
and years later,
this absence is replaced
with another, emptier one,
as if fixing this glaring hole
made in us,
were as easy as patching
the roof with a photograph
of a different hole.
I crack the egg top
with the back of a spoon,
a cup of half cooked yolk
after prayer. The methodical
triviality of tradition
burned into me
pushes the minute hand
forward, the spoon to my lips.
My grandmother’s
instruction for huevitos
pasados por agua
feels like baptism in the boil
of the morning commute.
And of course, today, downtown
is pockmarked with charcoal
crosses. The odd three
people in the crowd
of the train’s dozens
wear an antique
smudged on their forehead.
In their sleepy eyes,
I recognize a whole
realm of former self,
My skin unmarked, I
with they, ask
in our own ways
for deliverance. My afterlife
a part of my past,
I keep the dead
at the beginning,
foundation on which I am
built, mausoleum
on marmoreal face,
hardened by God, never again
between the friction
ridges of a priest’s finger.
Lucian Mattison is an Argentinian American poet and author of Peregrine Nation (The Broadkill River Press, 2014). He is the winner of the 2016 Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize and his poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Four Way Review, Hobart, Muzzle, Nashville Review, and elsewhere online and in print. His fiction appears in Fiddleblack and Per Contra and is forthcoming in Nano Fiction. He works at The George Washington University and is an associate editor for Big Lucks. To read more visit Lucianmattison.com.