“EL RUEGO”
by GENARO AGUILAR SAUCILLO
Lola Álvarez Bravo, Oaxaca, México, 1945
I thought about a play. It began in a confessional:
a man enters, surrenders himself to his tongue—
his hands, the soil on them, the weight they held
and what they had ploughed through.
The priest sometimes told him to go in peace
or ignored him altogether. The priest only heard thuds.
Either way, the man is left kneeling against himself
in the veiled booth. Either way, the sacristan,
played by myself, comes at dusk and closes everything
but the crawlspaces. I have been this man;
the stay as a form of fleeting fidelity. An etiolated faith.
The summer of catechism I broadcast sowed a boy.
Taught myself about the pebbles, the stillbirthed seeds,
the exact amalgamation I desired. Made him
to my image and will. He swam in the mud
as a question I lacked the grammar for. I slipped on it,
the way he made up prayers and excuses, the etymology
of the stagnant water in his mouth. I wanted to be a priest;
he only wanted to drink from the wine. He looked at me
the way water looks at everything: from all sides, indifferently.
We swam until his leaves sun-bleached and dried into September.
Some days I would’ve played the nun, her multiplicities:
barefoot, ragged at the knees or seedlings, away from the crowd,
kneeling toward whatever keeps the church’s mossy façade
from being only the outside of the church.
Sometimes I do. I pretend I do. I use a jerga for an alb.
I intercede with myself on everything I have yet to do.
Sometimes I wake with the gown on. I wake on the atrium floor,
the man enters, I serve him a cup of tea. We chat
for a while and then he crawls his way out of me. Nonetheless,
the benches are always left humid. I can tell it’s me—
the man I wrote, who never came out—
because the narthex is wide open,
I’m in the confesionario, bleeding mud from my chest,
and the ceiling crumbles, now cardboard
author pic here
Genaro Aguilar Saucillo is a Mexican poet and the founder and editor in chief of Paratextos, a finalist for Chill Subs and CLMP’s 2025 Literary Magazine Incubator. A 2026 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship mentee, they were runner-up for the 2026 Hayden’s Ferry Review Poetry Contest, finalist for 2026 Adroit Prizes for Poetry, and won Rattle’s December 2025 Ekphrastic Challenge as Editor’s Choice. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Adroit Journal, Allium, dialogist, trampset, Santa Rabia Poetry, Buenos Aires Poetry’s “Nueva Poesía: 18 poetas contemporáneos, Vol. 2,” and the first two young Mexican poets dossiers curated by Círculo de Poesía. They are a poetry reader for Fahmidan Journal and Palette Poetry. Their debut collection, Jauría, is forthcoming from Valparaíso Ediciones in late 2026.
Next ( Jaiden Thompson) >
< Previous ( Ava Chen)