Stain, Imprint, Communion (Stain)

By Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Issue 39 • Spring 2019 • Nonfiction

STAIN

Drawn  first by color then by weight to an  oval of ochre in the hot Marquez sand

a vein of rust a branch of blood centering the halves like the arroyo you crossed

with both sides  connected  by the thinnest of roots  yet somehow  intact somehow

surviving while  the painted Mary waits  nearby in a cave still blue on the walls

her hands pressed tight to the peeling prayers you can  almost feel the pulse in

your fingers rolled  over your bones across  your thumb the cracks and pits rise

the surface inside  your pocket a pollen of  grains worked deep  into your skin.

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of the award-winning Descanso For My Father: Fragments of a Life and Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams. His personal essays, lyric essays and prose poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Programs at Colorado State University and Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently at work on a book-length essay exploring liminal spaces and hybridity. A native New Mexican, he lives in Fort Collins with his wife and two children.