Eucharist: Digesting Men
by Sarah Nicell
The Catholic Church tells me, “That cracker in
your hand is the body of Jesus Christ.”
Thin wafers are manufactured flesh and
slicked with spit wine cups are filled with His blood
and I stomach both, chew the bones and gulp
the toes and snap! the veins of Jesus Christ,
my savior, with biting teeth and snaking
tongues and ribbed cheeks. He died so I could eat
His rotting skin and down His zombie sap,
martyred so He could slide down my throat like
sewage, thrown down the slime shoot with a Hail
Mary and a carnivorous prayer. He
wants His limp papery corpse to complete
a quick inspection, take a look for a
few hours or however long it takes
to digest a God, pressing crumbly man
hands to my esophagus. Nails that have
been growing since 30 AD scrape for
blood, real blood and not wine blood. He
searches for dirt, for grime, and of course He
finds it, swimming laps in stomach acid
and pressing hard with a thorned head to pass
through holes that have never been open to
things like Him. Jesus Christ had to become
a cracker and some alcohol because
how else could He get a dyke like me to
welcome Him in? How else could He ensure
that He is the first? He died to make girls
cannibals, bestial, preying upon
the best of men, but I do not want this
cracker and this wine and this meat and these
bodily fluids passing through either
end of my anatomy. I will throw
it up onto the altar, cracker chunks
and fermented bile and Holy Spirit.
My body does not understand these days.
Cannibalistic-ritual-Sundays.
Why don’t I want to eat for Him, on tongue?
To swallow for Him? For men? To show Him
and them my wrinkled intestines worming
along the underside of my skin and
how they are folded just right to fit more
things in there, sharp knives of things, that
I do not want? That I will not allow?
Other women do it. I can do it.
When the priest asks tongue or palm, I choose to
contaminate the cracker with my skin.
At least then God must hold queer hands before
Penetrating lesbian disciples.
Amen.