Madre

by Jonathan Fletcher

You conceived me on _____ __, ____, in the Peruvian city of ________. Your name was ___ _____; my father’s, ________ _________. You two met on ________ __, ____ in the city of _______. You were from ____; he, from ________. He was __ years old; you, __. You had _____ eyes; he, _____ eyes. You were _ feet and __ inches tall; he, ____ feet, _____ inches. I looked more like ___ than ___. Had you not left me at the hospital, you would’ve been _____. My name would have been ____ ______ _________. We would have been _____, sometimes ___, but mostly ______. Oh, what a _______, _____ family!

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 nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025. Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.