On Becoming
a Jesuit

By Dav id Abrams

May 11. Dull; afternoon fine.
Slaughter of the innocents.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins

One resolved match-strike and it is done:
The long scrape,
          The blooming spark,
                       The whiff of sulfur,
The paper leaps from his fingertips.
Once in the candle, the poems curl like embryos
Then stretch as far as metaphor allows.
Their ink-blood browns, bubbles in the heat then
The instress snaps,
The weave of alphabet unravels.
Inscape plumes, gyres over his head.
Caught in the puff of his one, breathy cry,
The secular smoke lingers like a whore’s kiss, then
Whirls straight to the flared nares of God.

• David Abrams, 40, lives on Fort Richardson. This poem won First Place in Poetry, Open to the Public.