Runner-up of the 2023 Contest in Poetry. Read judge Eduardo C. Corral’s blurb here.

Jesus Watches Me Get My Ass Swabbed

How many sexual partners have you had

in the past year? the patient intake form asks.

Lifting my head to do some mental math,

I see a portrait of the Virgin Mary on the wall.

If she were sitting here, pressing the clipboard

not too hard against her ripe conundrum belly,

she’d pencil in a zero. I lowball my number.

May we pray with you today? I check NO.

Mary would pray, her unzipped hoodie billowing

as she follows the nurse down the hallway,

wondering, “How will she judge me?”

Which is what I wonder, feeling the tightness

of my nice underwear I wore for some reason.

I am brought here by no divine summons,

though each boy had the voice of an angel

at the time. In the white exam room

there’s a cross on the wall with dead Jesus

or dying Jesus—I’ve never been sure which.

The white tissue draped over the big chair

seems almost sacred. Then, reverse communion

as the nurse takes my blood, scrapes some cells

from my throat. She explains that gonorrhea

can infect via the anus, and tentatively asks,

“Is that something that might apply to you?”

So I have to shuffle down my skinny jeans

and face the wall, where Jesus cocks his head

with curiosity, watching the sins he died for.

The insertion of the rough Q-tip is unlike

a nail, though it still feels like punishment.

Maybe it resembles the sting of holy conception,

which Mary recalls, tensing her spread thighs

while the nurse prods and says, “Are you telling me

no sexual partners?” Mary puts a palm on her stomach

and flinches at her son’s torture on the wall, thinking

how her goodness was pierced with goodness

to let him in, and she accepted, and he

is to be pierced with cruelty. “You understand,”

says the nurse, “that your body is a temple.”

I nod. Mary nods and takes the pamphlets

about food stamps and when the heartbeat starts.

The temple of Jesus’s body is ravaged

by wood and nails. He opens his mouth

as if to say, “I have never felt so alive.”

As if to say, “I forgive you.”