By Jonathan Fletcher
I was five, maybe six,
when I woke one night,
half asleep, speaking the language I’d lost
years before,
loud enough to wake you up.
What did I say?
You couldn’t tell. What did I dream?
I don’t remember.
Maybe the womb
of my birth mother,
a dark cavern
the size of South America.
Maybe Pizarro’s black
boots, leathered heel
atop my neck, ready to stomp
out the brown,
turn bone, like dreams, to powder.
—
Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023 for his debut chapbook, This is My Body, which was published in 2025. Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.