After the year when we didn’t go to church
we started over again. As the pastor blesses
the body and the blood I struggle to remove
the wafer from beneath thin cellophane.
From my fingers, whose frailty now glows,
my daughter in a baseball cap takes the elements
then lifts away a skim of plastic almost
invisible. For a moment, I do not believe. I do
not know if any of this was worth passing on.
But my child, trying out new pronouns,
who is like their mama, unfolds my suppose and
turns it inside out. Doubt works like that.
And I, a father, like Zechariah,
am left speechless in wonder if the God I know
knows how much I want this to matter for him.
Praying, something incommunicable leaps
from within me as I swallow the juice, then wait
for movement of the brim.
by Jae Newman
Jae Newman is the author of Collage of Seoul (Cascade 2015). His work has been published most recently in The MacGuffin, The Louisville Review, and Bicoastal and has been previously nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Rochester, New York, with his wife and children where he works as an English Professor and Pastor at Artisan Church.
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